Comrades, Franco and British hypocrisy
We arrive at the fiftieth anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco with two conflicting narratives. Memory is a perpetually relevant issue. We are memory. The only thing that truly shapes us is our memories: paradoxically, they are the least volatile of what we possess. Material and physical goods expire, but memory remains. If this is true for individuals, it is even more so collectively.
What memories does Spain have of its 20th century? What personalities have defined it? Well, fundamentally Franco. In the background, Primo de Rivera. And if we look closer to the end of the century, the trident of the Transition: Suárez, King Juan Carlos, and Felipe González. But Spanish memory of the last century revolves primarily around Franco, for or against. The Republic is as if it had no face or profile. Ask the average Spaniard if they know anything about Alcalá-Zamora or Azaña. The dictator's shadow looms large: he succeeded in discrediting the democratic republican regime, and the Transition did nothing to remedy this. On the contrary, it favored oblivion and ultimately validated the idea of two opposing extremes, not of a military uprising inspired by fascist ideas against a young and unstable democratic regime.
What, then, are Catalonia's memories and recollections of its 20th century? They are more republican and pluralistic in character. The great figures around whom we view our past are Francesc Macià and Lluís Companys. Also, their conservative predecessor, Prat de la Riba, along with the true ideological counterweight within Catalan nationalism, Francesc Cambó. And also Josep Tarradellas, who was the only republican escape route in the Catalan and Spanish Transition. Later on, of course, Pujol and Maragall, both products of anti-Francoism and Catalan nationalism.
This difference in their respective memories is defining. Spain has remained polarized by Francoism, either to combat it or to reclaim it. Catalonia has been marked by Catalan nationalism, sometimes more rebellious, sometimes more law-abiding. Franco wanted to erase the republican past, and to a large extent he succeeded in Spain, but not in Catalonia, where he crossed the line: the execution of Companys elevated him to the pantheon of martyrs.
Already during the Second Republic, the Spanish right wing, aided by the international atmosphere of fear within liberal democracies regarding Soviet communism, stoked the revolutionary specter. Western diplomacy based in Madrid and Barcelona was inclined to this narrative. Franco began to gain ground then.
Editorial Base is now publishing the collection of essays 'Perfidious Albion'Paul Preston's book, in which the British Hispanist examines the positions of British ambassadors, consuls, and journalists based in Spain during the 1930s, speaks directly of "betrayal of the Spanish Republic" and the hypocrisy of the Franco-British non-intervention, a pact by which "the legitimate [Spanish] government received the same treatment as the rebel military." Furthermore, "the financial authorities in London turned a blind eye to the operations of British banks to support the rebels acquiring weapons" while the Republic "encountered every obstacle." Preston reproduces an article by journalist Stephen Spender in the News Chronicle of On September 1, 1936, the author refers to the British consul in Barcelona, Norman King, a conservative who had become increasingly radicalized in favor of the rebels: "In Barcelona I met one of the most important British diplomatic representatives working in Spain. After a while, without asking about my colleagues, he expressed to me his wish that Companys, the constitutional president of the Catalan Republic (with whom he maintained a political relationship of international standing, second only to that of an ambassador), had been shot after the 1934 uprising." Indeed, a few years later, Companys would be executed by the dictatorship amid international silence. That infamous death is a reminder etched in the Catalan democratic memory.