‘Volvemos a empezar’: Return Journeys of the Spanish maquis

Abstract

Isolated from international events and from the gaze of the world prior to 1945, the end of the global conflict would impel numerous maquis fighters, many of them former members of the French Resistance, on a ‘return journey’ to continue, in their homeland, the struggle against tyranny. This article assesses the representation of the maquis in Spanish film from the 1950s, by which historical moment their most prominent figures, like Vitini and García Granda, had been captured and executed and the maquis had all but disappeared, to the early years of the twenty-first century and the film El laberinto del fauno. Therein, maquis appear as common criminals (bandoleros), as social outcasts who can only be cleansed through suffering, or, in the final years of the Franco regime and the Transition, as a means to prompting a democratic conscience and restoring the collective memory of the Republican resistance.

Keywords:

• Spanish film
• Francoist Spain
• resistance
• Civil War guerrillas
• maquis

Notes

 1. Although the French leader Léon Blum initially offered support to the Republic, he agreed with the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, on non-intervention in 1936, and called on all other European countries not to get involved in the Spanish War. These requests were ignored by Italy and Germany, who supported Franco with aircraft, weapons and military personnel throughout the three-year conflict. Neville Chamberlain, who replaced Baldwin in 1937, continued the non-intervention policy.

 2. Maquis comes from the Corsican macchia, scrubland, and was applied to French resistance fighters who struggled against the invading Nazi army. The word guerrilla, which was first applied in the struggle of Spaniards against Napoleonic invaders, refers to a line of shooters, an avant-garde group or series of small groups, whose mission is to harass the enemy, provoking skirmishes designed to distract them. They can be either plain clothes or military.

 3. For José Antonio Vidal Sales, the guerrilla movement started after the end of the war, even though it was not organized as such: ‘[E]l movimiento guerrillero no empezó en 1944 — hacia el fin del conflicto mundial, como generalmente se cree —, sino en 1939, y anteriormente en las regiones en las que triunfó la rebelión militar’. José Antonio Vidal Sales, Maquis: La verdad histórica de la ‘otra guerra’, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 2006, p. 18.

 4. Vidal Sales, Maquis, p. 45.

 5. This Agrupación de Guerrilleros would later be named Ejército Republicano de Liberación. Vidal Sales, Maquis, p. 32, p. 49.

 6. In Maquis. Historia de la guerrilla antifranquista, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2002, Secundino Serrano offers some comprehensive summaries of the developments in each of these and other geographical areas. For the period 1939 to 1944 in Extremadura, La Mancha and Andalusia, see pp. 82–92; León-Galicia, pp. 92–107; Santander and Asturias, pp. 107–12. For the important period of 1945 to 1947, Serrano studies Galicia-León, pp. 149–52; Asturias, pp. 163–71; Centro, pp. 171–82; Andalusia, pp. 182–90; and Levante and Aragón, pp. 190–97.

 7. The other three films are José Antonio Nieves Conde's Casa Manchada (1974), which was based on Emilio Romero's novel Todos morían en Casa Manchada (1969), Pedro Lazaga's El ladrido (1975) and Pedro Olea's Pim, pam, pum… ¡Fuego! (1975). Of these, Olea's is the only one which offers a sympathetic view of a maquis.

 8. To date, the only study of these films is Carlos Heredero's article, ‘Historias del maquis en el cine. Entre el arrepentimiento y la reivindicación’, Cuadernos de la Academia, 6 (1999), pp. 215–32.

 9. Román Gubern sees El santuario no se rinde as a film bridging the divide beween the ‘Crusade cinema’ and the reconciliatory note of 1950s films: ‘la película se ofrecía como un puente ente la exaltación épica del viejo “cine de Cruzada” y la nueva consigna de apaciguamiento y de reconciliación entre vencedores y vencidos, que será el leit-motiv propagandístico de los años cincuenta’. 1936–1939: la guerra de España en la pantalla, Madrid, Filmoteca Española (ICAA), 1986, p. 112.

10. ‘En noviembre de 1952 se produce el ingreso de España en la UNESCO. La firma del Concordato con el Vaticano tiene lugar en agosto del 52 (cuatro meses más tarde el embajador de la Santa Sede impone a Franco la ‘Orden de Cristo’) y en septiembre se rubrican los acuerdos bilaterales (militares y económicos) con los Estados Unidos, presididos entonces por el general Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. [Tras] la visita del Secretario de Estado Foster Dulles a Franco (uno de noviembre del 55), la ONU aprueba el ingreso de España un mes y medio después’. Carlos Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo: cine español 1951–1961, Valencia, Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana; Filmoteca Española, 1993, p. 29.

11. The most infamous case in which the Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas was applied was the execution of Julián Grimau for war crimes in 1963, following a mock trial in which the defence was not allowed to speak on his behalf.

12. Heredero studies this film alongside others which deal with variants of Andalusian banditry: Las huellas del tiempo, pp. 260–65.

13. Lazaga also directed one of the most important films made about the war, La fiel infantería (1959), as well as El frente infinito (1956), which was based on a novel by Rafael García Serrano, a Falangist and former combatant. Lazaga, according to Gubern, is the Spanish director who has made the greatest number of films associated with the war: La guerra, p. 120.

14. Heredero notes how this approach reinforces the Francoist thesis of Spain as a family divided by foreign hate: Las huellas del tiempo, p. 207.

15. Two brothers who follow different paths is also the theme of Julio Salvador's Lo que nunca muere (1954) and Rafael Gil's Murió hace quince años (1955), where a member of the Communist Party returns to Spain to kill a relative.

16. Director Alexandre, who went to work in exile in Cuba afterwards, reflected on these alterations after the end of the dictatorship in an interview held in 1991. He remarks on the dangers that the censors saw in the warm relationship that develops between the maquis and the upper-crust woman that he kidnaps. Heredero mentions the lack of didacticism in a film that, he considers, offers a more oblique version of events, which met the constraints of the existing censorship: Las huellas del tiempo, p. 205.

17. Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936-1945, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 50. The original sources are speeches delivered between 1938 and 1940.

18. Paloma Aguilar observes the recurrence of the word ‘peace’ in books of the era, suggesting the obsession with war on the part of society: ‘Only a nation traumatized by war could be so devoted to peace […]. This is the only possible explanation for the huge number of books that appeared during the Franco period containing the word “peace” in their title’: Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, New York, Berghahn, 2002, p. 135.

19. Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe, New York and London, Routledge, 2009, p. 312.

20. Romero voices these ideas through López, who remarks that ‘El pueblo no sabía lo que quería cuando votaba. Se movía por impresiones y por emociones’: La paz empieza nunca, Barcelona, Planeta, 1979, pp. 71 and 77.

21. The Politics of Revenge in 20th Century Spain, London, Unwin Hyman, 1990, p. 12.

22. El mensaje was first performed in Bilbao's Teatro Arriaga in 1955 and subsequently in Barcelona in 1959.

23. On this film, see Francesc Sánchez-Barba, Brumas del franquismo: el auge del cine negro español (1950–1965), Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona, 2007, pp. 373–81.

24. Ferrán Sánchez Agustí comments on these young men and the actors cast in these roles in El maquis anarquista: de Toulouse a Barcelona por los Pirineos, Lleida, Milenio, 2006, p. 251.

25. Los atracadores shows the crucial role played by the Francoist patriarchal family in strengthening its social arrangements, with a further dimension added to this formation: that of the ‘lost’ father. The film explicitly indicates that the leading young man at the centre of the story, Vidal, becomes a hardened criminal because of his father. This is very much in line with the failed family invoked by José Antonio Nieves Conde in his famous Balarrasa (1951). As Marsha Kinder notes, these patriarchal figures are embodiments of a type of Oedipal triangle which is peculiar of Spanish noir, within which she classes Los atracadores: Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, California UP, 1993, p. 60.

26. Women are also the central protagonists of Montxo Armendáriz's Silencio roto (2001) and del Toro's El laberinto del fauno.

27. José Luis Sánchez Noriega corroborates that the plot is narrated from Juana's point of view, for not only is she in all but five scenes, but she witnesses or takes part imaginatively in the rest so that spectators only know what she does: Mario Camus, Madrid, Cátedra, 1998, p. 269.

28. On Flores's trajectory as Marisol in 1960s Spain, see Núria Triana Toribio's study, where she locates the actor within both the ‘continuity and the desire for change’ of the time: Spanish National Cinema, London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 84–95.

29. Significantly, Camus changed the words of Ecclesiastes: ‘eternity’ for ‘past’ in the expression ‘the days of the past’. For Noriega, the words simply suggest the inevitability of time passing: Sánchez Noriega, Mario Camus, p. 273.

30. These scenes, which echo El espíritu de la colmena, are clearly reminiscent of the Lumière brothers' famous L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895), where the train is a symbol of progress, linking the village with the unseen world elsewhere.

31. The film's music score was written by Antón García Abril, who also worked with Camus in his most famous film, Los santos inocentes (1984), based on Miguel Delibes's book of the same title (1981).

32. These ‘Cantabrian Wars’ started in 29 B.C. and lasted for ten years. The Cantabrian north of Spain (today's Asturias and Santander) were the last outposts which resisted the Roman invasion. The event refers to groups of people who took refuge in the mountains, the Picos de Europa, and who were besieged until they died of starvation in 26 B.C. Asturias itself was named by Augustus in 14 B.C. as Astúrica Augusta.