Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  20

  From Franco to Berlusconi

  I

  Aspiring novelists are never short of a subject. When all else fails, there’s family and autobiography. Aspiring professional historians have no built-in guide to what part of the past they want to explore, and therefore in most cases what their reputation will rest on – the Tudors, the English Revolution, seventeenth-century Spain or whatever. Usually they acquire a subject at university, give it a title to get a doctorate (or, in my day, when Oxbridge looked down on such titles, a fellowship dissertation) and in most cases stick to their ‘field’ or ‘period’ thereafter. The war had blocked my own attempts to follow this path. So it happened that my first book as a historian, Primitive Rebels, was in a field I had not previously thought much about, and indeed a field nobody else had thought about at all.1 Essentially, it is a book based on my frequent travels in Spain and Italy in the 1950s, two countries to which my life and the fortunes of my writings have been linked ever since.

  Unlike Italy – what antifascist would go there? – Spain, where I began to travel in 1951, had been part of my life for a long time – even before the Spanish Civil War, which made it part of everyone’s life in my generation. In spite of everything, after 1945 it was still a strange country for other Europeans. In the minds of most of us it still belonged to a curious realm where the images of revolution, war and defeat in arid landscapes were superimposed on the images of exoticism – flamenco, castanets, bullfights, Carmen, Don José, Escamillo – and those of a generic ‘Spanishness’ – Don Quixote, honour, pride and silence. My uncle had been there and had got to know people there in his time with Universal Films. The relics of his visits filled odd corners of our house: a banderilla soaked in dry blood, a book on bullfighting, a signed photo of an elderly, military-looking Catalan autonomist leader and the like. After the 1934 insurrection in Asturias, a friend sent him copies of the Spanish illustrated papers, I imagine the monarchist ABC with dramatic pictures. And then, in the summer of 1936, in the first weeks after the generals’ rising, thanks to a curious combination of historical circumstances, for a brief moment I saw it myself.

  I was then living in Paris for three months before going up to Cambridge, on a grant from the London County Council to improve my French. One day at the end of July I discovered to my agreeable surprise that I had bought a winning lottery ticket. It did not amount to much – I remember it as 165 Francs or about £2–3. Fortunately the new Popular Front government of France had shortly before introduced one of its rare lasting innovations, les congés payés (holidays with pay) and – thanks to another innovation, an undersecretaryship of sports and leisure – ultra-cheap rail travel to enable the population to enjoy them. I therefore used my lottery winnings to take the train from Orsay station – still half a century away from being turned into a museum of nineteenth-century French art – to the Pyrenees for a fortnight of walking, youth hostelling and camping. Halfway through this superb excursion I was introduced to a more expeditious form of cheap movement by one of those peripatetic young central Europeans who in those days pioneered hitchhiking (‘Tippeln’, ‘Autostop’) on this side of the Atlantic. And so I found myself, carried from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean side of the Pyrenees, in a youth hostel close to the Spanish border near the town of Puigcerda. The occasion was too tempting. I went to the frontier, and was turned back by the young militia man who guarded it. I did not have the right papers. I walked a mile or so to the next crossing, where they let me pass without problems and I spent the day looking round Puigcerda, then for all practical purposes an independent revolutionary commune, dominated by the anarchists, with an admixture of members of POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). (I could see no sign of the communists or the socialists, merged by then into a single party, the PSUC [Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia].) I don’t remember how exactly I communicated with the locals, who were naturally interested in an unannounced, indeed in any, stranger, but this is a corner where Spain and France are very mixed up, and Catalan is in any case as close to one language as to the other. I recall no problems. My most lasting image of this memorable day is of a few trucks parked on the main square. Whenever someone felt like going to the war, he went to the trucks, and whenever one filled up with enough volunteers, I was told, it went off to the front. As I wrote about this experience many years later:

  The phrase c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre should have been invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the main effect of this experience on me was, that it took me twenty years before I was prepared to see Spanish anarchism as anything but a tragic farce. 2

  In fact, Puigcerda did not give the impression of a community geared for war, nor do I recall it as a place full of armed young men in militia outfits, in the manner of later revolutions. (No sign in the Spanish provinces of 1936, for example, of uniformed young women.) If anything, it seemed a town full of politics, talk and arguments, of people standing in groups or sitting at café śtables with newspapers.

  Unfortunately, the day ended badly. The young anarchist frontier-guard who had turned me back at my first crossing-point came off duty that evening, saw me eating and chatting on the plaza, and immediately reported me to his commissar. I was interrogated, politely enough but firmly, by an unsmiling man in something like military gear. I am sure that he did not know what to make of my presence there – I did not know what to make of it myself – but clearly, the power of the workers could not be treated so lightly, even if the young Englishman who crossed the frontier not only irregularly, but in flat defiance of the decision to keep him out, had shown no signs of wanting to be a danger to the revolution. To be grilled by trigger-happy amateurs on the lookout for counter-revolutionaries is never relaxing. I confess that I was nervous, late that evening, when I was told to walk along the dark road back to the French frontier, the gun-barrel of an armed militiaman aimed at my back. So my fleeting contact with the Spanish Civil War ended with expulsion from the Spanish Republic.

  What was I doing that day in Puigcerda? This is where the historian throws up his hands, faced with the autobiographer. It is not simply that my memory of that day has almost certainly been corrupted by sixty-odd years of mental redrafting, but that even on the day itself my purpose, if that is the right word, in crossing the frontier, cannot have been clear. What would I have done, if my stay there had not been cut short so suddenly? Given the common memory of the Spanish Civil War I should have been considering joining the forces of the Republic in the war against fascism, as several other young English people did in the first weeks of the Civil War. Almost certainly nothing like this was in my mind as I went to have a look at what a revolution was like, in spite of the passionate identification I, like others of my generation on the left, immediately felt with the fight of the Spanish Popular Front government. Did it enter my mind during that day? I cannot say, or if I could reconstruct my feelings perhaps I would want to take refuge behind the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution, because in the light of the subsequent establishment of International Brigades13 any answer might be discreditable. If I did not consider it, then why not? And if I did, why did I nevertheless not join up? Supposing there were any sources other than my personal memory, what conclusion might another historian, less personally biased in the matter, come to about the strange case of young EJH in the Spanish revolution? Such are the problems of writing history as biography, or perhaps the wider problems of understanding human nature. At all events, my day in Puigcerda demonstrates the pointlessness of the ‘what if’ exercises in history which now carry the jargon title of ‘counterfactuals’. There is no way we can choose between the countless hypotheses about how my subsequent life might or might not have been affected, if that young anarchist border guard had not refused me entry at that first frontier crossing. And it also demonstrates that nothing serves the historian better than keeping his eyes and ears open, especially if he or she has the luck to be in the right place at the right
time. Puigcerda gave me my first introduction to, and a permanent fascination with, that quintessential breeding ground for ‘Primitive Rebels’, namely Spanish anarchism. In the 1950s I found myself pursuing it ‘in the field’, largely inspired by that remarkable work of Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, which I must have read soon after its second edition came out in 1950. I can no longer remember whether I read it before or, more likely, after my first real acquaintance with Spain, which left behind ‘the deep and lasting impression which Spain makes on those who know her’.3 At least two of my visits to Spain were essentially explorations of the anarchist tradition: in 1956, when I found my way to Casas Viejas, the village which had once upon a time (in 1933) tried to make the world revolution on its own, and in 1960, when, deeply moved, I followed the traces of a recently fallen anarchist guerrillero Francisco Sabaté. 4

  I am no longer sure why I decided in the Easter vacation of 1951 to travel to Spain. It was a country of whose language I was ignorant, give or take the texts of Civil War slogans and songs and the ideological vocabulary which was international anyway. As later in Italy, I had to pick it up in conversation, with occasional reference to a small pocket dictionary – easier in Italy, where talk was mainly in educated Italian, than in Spain, where my informants were hardly ever intellectuals. (If they had been, we would probably have communicated in French.) One way or another, I was to pick up some spoken if ungrammatical fluency in both languages fairly quickly, beginning immediately after my arrival in Barcelona with an evening at the Café śNuevo on the Paralelo (coffee and show, five pesetas) where my neighbour, a mason just arrived from Murcia looking for work, taught me the words for ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘blonde’, ‘brunette’, and other relevant terms by pointing to the corresponding features of the (mediocre) artistes on the tiny stage.

  My contemporary notes5 suggest I was attracted by the news of the great and successful tramway boycott against higher fares of early March in Barcelona, followed by a general strike, about which I wrote a piece when I returned. I thought, with excessive anticipation, that it ‘broke that crust of passivity and attentisme which (with the lack of effective illegal organisations) is Franco’s greatest asset today…’ 6 This was an overoptimistic assessment, although the first cracks in the regime appeared in the second half of that decade. The anti-Franco exiles I came to know then were not only from Republican backgrounds, such as the historian (and eventual head of the post-Franco Spanish cultural services) Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz, son of the man still recognized by the émigrés as the nominal president of a ghost-republic, but children from the families that made up the Franco establishment. One of them, my dear friend Vicente Girbau Léon, had gone to a Franco jail directly from a post in the general’s foreign service. He later shared my flat in Bloomsbury, before helping to establish the publishing house Ruedo Ibérico in Paris, whose contraband titles, including Hugh Thomas’s pioneering book on the Civil War, were to be influential inside Spain in the sixties among the rapidly growing movement of young dissidents. It was he who later put me in touch with the anarchists.

  At all events in 1951 I had my first experience of a Barcelona still filled with ‘the field-grey teams of the armed police, with rifles and sub-machine guns sticking out like bristles, every hundred-odd yards in the town-centre, and by the factory gates’ and guarding the characteristically palatial banks, symbol of the downtown street scene of Franco Spain, like fortresses of the rulers who dominated a hungry people. After a few days in Barcelona I made my way by a mixture of trains and hitchhiking down the coast to Valencia, then to Murcia, Madrid, Guadalajara, Zaragoza and back to Barcelona.

  Spain was poor and hungry in the early 1950s, perhaps hungrier than at any time in living memory. People seemed to live on potatoes, cauliflower and oranges. Had Tarragona ever been so badly off in its entire history, I asked myself as I looked at that wonderful gold-blond cathedral among the ruins of the Roman Empire. Spain had no public voices. The news from Barcelona reached the rest of Spain through rumour, travellers such as myself, hawkers, truck-drivers, occasional listeners to foreign radio. There were only obscure allusions in the press. Intellectually, the country, most of its talent in emigration, seemed strangled (‘few Spanish works in the ‘‘serious’’ bookshop’ – translations and even Spanish classics mainly in Latin American editions).

  Spain was unhappy. Time and again, in cafés, in the cabs of trucks, or on the unspeakably awful correos, the slow but cheap trains stopping at all stations, people would say things like: ‘This is the worst country in the world’ or ‘People in this country are poorer than anywhere else.’ ‘Everything in this country has gone to pot since Primo de Rivera [1923–30],’ said the matriarch of a family of cheapjack traders from Madrid who took me under their wing. Spain had not forgotten the Civil War and the vanquished, though powerless and hopeless, had not changed their mind about it. And yet, time and again, when the subject came up, someone would say: ‘Civil War – nothing is worse. Father against son, brother against brother.’ Franco Spain in the early 1950s was a regime sustained by the argument of Thomas Hobbes that any effective political order is better than no order. The regime survived, in spite of its perceived injustice and massive unpopularity – at all events in the eastern parts of the country, where I travelled – not so much because of its power and readiness to terrorize, but because nobody wanted another Civil War. Perhaps Franco might not have survived if, at the end of the Second World War, the Americans and British had decided that he should not, and allowed the armed resistance units from southern France, largely composed of Spanish Republicans, to invade the country. But they did not.

  Above all, Spain was isolated. Its blood-soaked regime was still enclosed in the carapace of anti-modernity, traditionalist Catholicism and self-contained autarchy. The extraordinary industrialization of the country, which was to make it unrecognizable, and even to change the very physical appearance of Spaniards in the next thirty or forty years, had hardly begun. Where else in Europe, except the equally self-sealed Portugal, could one still have found a place like Murcia, indistinguishable from a Habsburg provincial city before 1914: nannies in black-and-white uniforms by the dozen supervising their children along the river promenade, eyed by soldiers from the local barracks; middle-class young women with chaperones; farmers and pig-dealers settling bargains in market cafés? Tourists were counted in hundreds, not in tens of millions. The Mediterranean coasts were still empty. When I recall the costas of Andalusia in the early 1950s, what comes into my mind is a dusty, white-hot, empty road between stones and sea with a view of vultures descending from all parts of the sky to join the mob already eviscerating the cadaver of a mule or donkey. Perhaps it was the absence of that great corrupter of morals, the mass tourism of the rich in the territories of the poor, which allowed the Spaniards of the time to keep their traditional pride. Nothing struck me more in those days than the insistence of poor men and women on maintaining relations of reciprocity: not accepting a cigarette without offering one in return, or refusing a brandy from an evidently better-off Englishman, which was not compatible with equivalence, but accepting a coffee, which was. In my experience foreigners had not yet become essentially sources of income for poor natives, not even when – as in 1952 – they arrived in Seville, as I did with some student friends, in an evidently British yacht and moored in town, just opposite the as yet ungentrified bars of Triana.

  Because Spain seemed to be, and likely to remain, frozen in its history, it was unusually dangerous ground for outside observers and analysts. The overpowering presence of an apparently unchanging past – including the recent past – concealed the forces, internal and external, that were about to transform the country more dramatically and irreversibly than almost any other in Europe within the next few decades. I tried to understand its history, but apart from recognizing that Francoism would not last, I clearly had no clue where it was going. As late as 1966 I found myself writing: ‘capitalism has persisten
tly failed in that country and so has social revolution, in spite of its constant imminence and occasional eruption’. It was not yet obvious to me how anachronistic that sentence had by then become. Would closer contact with the anti-Franco opposition or Spanish intellectuals in the 1950s have given me a greater sense of realities? I doubt it, for the only effective opposition party, the Communist Party, was then still resisting the information brought out of the country by its illegal cadres, that there was no prospect of a sudden overthrow of the regime. The anarchists, once so powerful in the Spanish labour movement, had not survived the Civil War as a serious force. Nevertheless, on looking back, I am astonished at how little contact I had in the 1950s with intellectual and politically hip persons in Spain, or, before the 1960s, with the new generation of younger Spanish students and ex-students who came to me in London as someone they had heard of on the left, or as readers of my books, which began to be issued by publishers unknown to me, sometimes in rather bad translations, from 1964 on – a symptom of the slow weakening of the regime faced with the massive cultural and political dissidence of its educated young. The 1960s in Spain were the first of several historic moments when the fading of authoritarian regimes proved beneficial to this author.

  II

  My discovery of Italy in 1952 differed from that of Spain in almost every respect. For one thing, Italy was neither hungry nor stagnant. Even getting around cheaply – and in the 1950s I usually budgeted for the equivalent of £1 a day all in – I would not expect to find, as in Spain, would-be middle-class travellers with patched clothes. Though the days of the economic miracle did not transform the lives of ordinary Italians until the 1960s, even in the north, the early signs of dynamism were already visible: colourful modern roadside-stations, already more than mere dispensers of petrol, the universal high-tech espresso machines which were about to conquer the world, the crowds of motor-scooters anticipating the eruption of cheap cars. Not that Italy was entirely on the way to western ‘modernity’, especially not in the south and the islands. Indeed, if Primitive Rebels has any single origin it lies in a dinner in the house of Professor Ambrogio Donini in Rome in 1952, or rather conversations after dinner, since, by the egalitarian convictions of the Doninis, family, servants and guests took their meals together. My host ‘told me something about the Tuscan Lazzarettists and the sectarians of Southern Italy’.7 For he was both a member of the Italian Communist Party’s Central Committee – indeed a rather hard-line Stalinist – and an expert in the history of religions. He therefore noted with approval that the followers of a Tuscan rural Messiah killed in 1878 had quietly survived to have another try at the millennium by rising in 1948 after the attempted assassination of the Italian CP leader, Palmiro Togliatti. He also told me about the problems arising for the Party leadership from the insistence of several rural Party branches – 1949–50 was a great era of radicalization in the south – on electing as branch secretaries members of the Seventh Day Adventists or similar sects, who would not normally have been regarded as obvious material for the cadres of a Marxist party. Who were these people, who brought ways of thinking which would have been quite usual in the Middle Ages into mid-twentieth-century political movements? Who treated the era of Lenin and Stalin as though it were also the era of Martin Luther? What went on in their minds? How did they, as distinct from the political movements which drew strength from their support, see the world? Why was so little attention paid to them, except by Italian thinkers such as the extraordinary Antonio Gramsci? Italy, it seemed, was full of their traces. Fascinated and moved, I tried to discover them by travelling along Mediterranean back roads for the next few years. Luckily some anthropologists were developing an interest in similar problems they encountered in their enquiries into the anti-colonial movements in Africa. Max Gluckman of Manchester, a man of great originality and a formidable academic chieftain who took his department every week to support Manchester United in the proper anthropological manner, arranged for me to give three lecture-seminars, in the course of which (also followed by his tribe) he gave me my first sight of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and decided I should expand my lectures into a book.