Introduction: trajectories of republican exiles after the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT

This is an introduction to a special issue on the experiences of Republican exiles who fled Spain during Spanish Civil War. The aim of the issue is to focus on elements of the experiences of Spaniards in exile that have received little attention in English-language scholarship. The articles within cover the experiences of women in exile in France; Spaniards who fought in the Free French Forces during the Second World War; the plight of Republican refugees in Soviet gulags; and Spanish intellectuals in exile who clashed with the Spanish Communist Party on issues relating to pro-amnesty campaigns for political prisoners in Spain.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish Civil War
• Refugees
• Exile

In March 1939 the Spanish Civil War was nearing its tragic end. The insurgent army, led by General Francisco Franco, had swept through Catalonia, one of the Republic’s remaining strongholds, in January and was now in the process of pacifying the resisting Republican forces concentrated primarily in parts of central and southern Spain. The violent repression of the insurgents in conquered territory since 1936 had provided ample evidence of what awaited the vanquished under the Franco regime. Many of those unable to escape Spain on ships chose suicide over capture and the prospect of imprisonment or execution (Guzmán 1973). For those who neither escaped nor took their own lives, a cruel fate awaited them. Many would face long prison sentences, forced labour, poverty and death. The Franco regime never let the defeated forget that it considered them internal enemies and this divide between victors and vanquished has had repercussions that have endured into the twenty-first century (Aguilar 2002).

Many Spaniards, however, did escape. In the early months of 1939, close to half a million refugees fled Spain over the French border. The numbers escaping over such a short period created difficulties for the French government, which responded by constructing makeshift internment camps while it sought to negotiate a settlement with Franco’s government that would facilitate their eventual return to Spain (e.g. Rafaneau-Boj 1995; Soriano 1989; Yusta 2001; Bravo-Tellado 1974). Others were lucky enough to escape to states where they could at least attempt to rebuild their lives, such as to Britain, the Soviet Union, or further afield in Mexico (e.g. Monferrer Catalán 2007; Alted Vigil 2007; Pla Brugat 1999). But the prospect of exile in the spring of 1939 was rendered worse by the brewing world conflict that would begin in September 1939. While political developments in Spain since 1931 had served as a microcosm of the broader ideological polarisation taking place in Europe during this decade, the mass exodus of refugees from Spain would in many ways project Spaniards into a continent even more polarised and this had a profound impact on the exile they experienced (Constante 1974; Pike 2014; Vilanova 1969).

Although historians of the Anglophone world played an important role in beginning the process of writing the history of the Spanish Civil War before the death of Franco and there has been a sustained interest in that conflict and the regime that emerged from it, the issue of Spanish exile has received relatively little attention. There are, of course, a number of notable exceptions (e.g. Stein 1979; Pike 1993); Soo 2013), but this special issue seeks to go some way towards filling the gap in the scholarship on the refugees who fled Spain at the end of the Civil War.

In the first article in this special issue, Alba Martínez Martínez explores the forging of a specifically female form of Spanish refugee identity in France in the decades following the end of the Spanish Civil War. The article draws on an analysis of correspondence sent by Spanish refugee women to various relief bodies offering assistance to Spanish refugees in France to argue that, while efforts were made from above to impose a heavily gendered form of identity on these women – not least by the organisations that sought to help them – the process of identity construction was a complex one in which the refugee women themselves were far from passive actors. Rather, the article argues that this identity – the constitutive elements of which were based around concepts of motherhood, labour and anti-fascism – was one that the refugee women actively constructed, appropriated and reshaped for their own benefit.

Diego Gaspar Celaya’s analysis is also centred in France but focuses instead on the individual and collective trajectories of the roughly 1,100 Spanish exiles who contributed to the defence and liberation of France between 1939 and 1945 as volunteers in the Free French Forces (FFL). Through a close reading of personal testimony and documentary material housed in French military archives, Gaspar Celaya demonstrates the importance of French internment camps as recruitment grounds for these “transnational soldiers”, constructs a detailed profile of the typical Spanish volunteer and traces the nature of their fighting experiences. Significantly, the article also reflects critically on the range of interconnected factors that, in the context of the Cold War, served at once to obscure the significant contribution they made to defeating Nazism and prevented many from ever returning to their Spanish homeland.

Luiza Iordache Cârstea’s article switches the geographical focus to the Eastern Europe, with an analysis of one of the lesser-known aspects of Spanish exile in the Soviet Union: the incarceration in Soviet prisons and internment in forced labour camps of hundreds of Spaniards during the Stalinist era. Built on an analysis of the memoirs of surviving detainees and documentation from numerous archives, the article details the purges conducted against different “collectives” of Spanish exiles in the Soviet Union – including groupings of “circumstantial” exiles, but also a number of political exiles who had initially rejoiced at the idea of a new life in the Soviet Union – along with the reasons for their arrest, the brutal conditions they experienced in the Gulag, and their respective struggles for survival, freedom and repatriation.

The final article by Olga Glondys takes a fresh look at the significance of the controversy that surrounded the publication in the New York Times in 1961 of a protest letter, authored by a prominent group of anti-Francoist intellectuals in exile, that opposed the pro-amnesty campaigns for Spanish political prisoners then being spearheaded by the Spanish Communist Party. Glondys contends that the heated debates provoked by the publication of this letter revealed a growing opposition among anti-Francoist intellectuals in exile to the long-held strategy of countering communist campaigns and propaganda activities in the strongest possible terms. This shift, we see, was the first stage in a changing political paradigm, one characterised not only by the increasing marginalisation of formerly influential leaders in exile who were of a radically anti-communist bent, but also a rejection of the dichotomous communist/anti-communist approach to anti-Francoist opposition in favour of a more open, inclusive approach that encouraged greater collaboration between different opposition groups operating both inside and outside of Spain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.