The persistence of the rural idyll: peasant imagery, social change and nationalism in Spain 1939–1978

Abstract

In this article the authors propose a historical analysis of the role of romantic rural imagery in the Spanish (state and peripheral) re-nationalization processes during the Franco dictatorship through the scope of the political and identity meanings assigned to it. Their goal is to better comprehend twentieth-century Spain by examining the use (and abuse) of the rural imaginary by Spanish, Basque and Galician nationalisms, particularly during the time of the totalitarian regime of General Franco, giving special attention to the cultural loans between the ideological (and national) blocs traditionally interpreted as monolithic and irreconcilable: Francoism (1936–1975) and its political opposition.

Keywords:

• Catholicism
• Francoism
• ruralism
• Spanish nationalism
• Basque nationalism
• Galician nationalism

Acknowledgements

This article stems from research project EM 2012/035 (USC), research group GI-1657 (USC), HAR2014-51956-P (UPV-EHU) and research Group IT-708-13 (UPV-EHU). J. Louzao, A. Quiroga, M. Cabo and G. Fernández helped us a lot with critical revisions and suggestions for readings. We especially acknowledge the two reviewers of the ERH-RHE for their valuable comments and criticism.

Notes

1. Cazorla, Fear and Progress; Townson, Spain Transformed.

2. Hervieu and Viard, L’archipiel paysan.

3. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 288–9.

4. Cazorla, Fear and Progress, 96–101; Arco, “Hunger and Consolidation,” 458–83.

5. It is striking to see the absence of chapters dedicated to the rural world in Delanty and Kumar, SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism; Herb and Kaplan, Nations and Nationalism; Breuilly, Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism.

6. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 16.

7. Tilly, Formation of National States in Western Europe; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen.

8. Beyen and Van Ginderachter, “General Introduction: Writing the Mass into a Mass Phenomenon,” 3–22; Núñez, “Nations and Territorial Identities in Europe,” 669–84.

9. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Conversi, “Homogeneisation, Nationalism and War,” 371–4.

10. Molina, “¿Realmente la nación vino a los campesinos?,” 79–102.

11. Cabo and Molina, “The Long and Winding Road of Nationalization,” 264–86.

12. Conversi, “Modernism and Nationalism,” 13–34.

13. Thiesse, La creation des identités nationales, 159–60; Williams, Country and the City, 14–19.

14. Thiesse, La création, 158.

15. Jessenne, Les campagnes françaises, 32–5.

16. Storm, The Culture of Regionalism.

17. Langewiesche, La época del Estado nación en Europa, 56–7.

18. Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France; Ploux, Une memoire de papier, 132.

19. Quiroga, “Three Spheres,” 691; Louzao, “Catholicism versus Laicism,” 664.

20. Cloke, “Country Backwater to Virtual Village?,” 369; Little, “Introduction: Other Countrysides?,” 1–4.

21. Halfacree, “Still Surprises in Store,” 87–103.

22. Little, “Otherness, Representation and the Cultural Construction of Rurality,” 438–40; Cloke, “Country Backwater,” 370.

23. Molina, “Historical Dynamics of Ethnic Conflicts,” 242–6.

24. Molina, “España no era tan diferente,” 179–200; Antonio Rivera, Señas de identidad.

25. Archilés, “Hacer región es hacer patria,” 121–47; Archilés, “Lenguajes de nación,” 91–114.

26. Louzao, “Las imágenes de lo sagrado,” 453–83.

27. Delgado, La otra Bizkaia.

28. Castells and Rivera, “Las víctimas, del victimismo construido a las víctimas reales,” 268–78.

29. Altuna, El buen vasco, 67–8.

30. Altuna, El buen vasco, 17; Louzao, “El Síndrome de Jerusalén,” 87–93.

31. The “normative conflict” in Berger, The Limits of Social Cohesion.

32. Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict, 77–8. The French case in Lebovics, True France.

33. Louzao, “Catholicism versus Laicism,” 657–80; Louzao, “¿Una misma fe para dos naciones?,” 281–9.

34. Louzao, “El Síndrome de Jerusalén,” 95–6.

35. Perea, El modelo de Iglesia subyacente en la pastoral del clero vasco.

36. Louzao, “Catholicism versus Laicism,” 665–6, quotation in p. 665.

37. Christian, Visionaries; Louzao, “La Virgen y la Salvación de España,” 187–210. Historical accounts by this new historiography of religion in Spain fit well with France (see Thomas Kselman’s works) or Poland (see Brian Porter-Szücs’).

38. Louzao, Soldados de la fe o amantes del progreso, 207–27.

39. Hervieu-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory; Louzao, “Catholicism versus Laicism,” 664.

40. Louzao, “Las imágenes de lo sagrado;” Louzao, Soldados de la fe, 86–94.

41. Quiroga, “Hermanos de sangre,” 629–59; Goode, Impurity of Blood; Douglass, “Sabino’s Sin,” 95–112.

42. Berriotxoa, Como un jardín, 326.

43. Ibid., 325.

44. Ibid., 320.

45. Altuna, El buen vasco, 170–2; Castells, “La arquitectura y pintura vasca de la Restauración,” 37–49.

46. Molina, “Reign of Christ over the Nation,” 17–33; Louzao, “¿Una misma fe para dos naciones?” 271–98.

47. Rodríguez Lago, “Los católicos, las instituciones eclesiásticas y el nacionalismo gallego,” 299–323.

48. Beramendi, De provincia a nación.

49. Beramendi, “El Partido Galleguista y poco más,” 146.

50. Vicente Risco, in A Nosa Terra, 13/04/1935, quoted in Cabo, “Galeguismo, agro e agrarismo na Galicia da II República,” 375. Another of his revealing expressions was: “the radical feeling of our ethnic affectivity is the adoration of the earth,” quoted in García, Territorio y nacionalismo, 115.

51. Rodríguez Castelao, Obra Completas, 18–19.

52. Antom Santos, “Terra a Nosa!,” 384–5.

53. This term was invented by Ernst Bruckmüller for the Austrian Catholic agrarian organisations and applied to Galicia in Cabo and Miguez, “El maurismo en Galicia,” 87–115.

54. Quiroga, Making Spaniards.

55. Cabo and Miguez, “Discursos identitarios en el movimiento agrario en Galicia entre 1890 y 1936,” 285–302.

56. Philippe Burrin’s concept of “ideological runway” in Forti, El peso de la nación. Religion as a “nationalist runaway” in Núñez and Molina, “Identidad nacional, heterodoxia y biografía,” 16.

57. Vincent, “Expiation as Performative Rhetoric in National Catholicism,” 235–56. “Parafascism” in Rodríguez Barreira, “The Many Heads of the Hydra,” 702–26.

58. Fernández, Cabo and Pan Montojo, “Fascism and Modernity in the European Countryside,” 21.

59. Sevilla-Guzmán, La evolución del campesinado en España, 141; Gómez, Políticos, burócratas y expertos, 76, 331–2.

60. Obra Nacional Corporativa, Movimiento Nacional Agrario, 4.

61. Miguez Macho, “La destrucción de la ciudadanía y la reruralización ideológica de la sociedad,” 295–308.

62. Quoted from Noriega Varela in Freixeiro: “A poesía bélica de Noriega Varela e tres poemas apócrifos,” 71–105.

63. Molina and Rojo, Historia del Túnel de Artxanda 1900–2002, 121–5, 154–6; Pérez, “De la comunidad nacional a la comunidad de propietarios,” 215–47. New Fascist urbanism similar to Bilbao in Muñoz-Rojas, Ashes and Granite.

64. Miguez Macho, La genealogía genocida del franquismo, 80–2; Quiroga, Hermanos de sangre, 655–6.

65. Díaz Geada et al., “Agricultural Extension Programmes in Post-war Europe.”

66. Simpson, Spanish Agriculture.

67. Castro, “Lo rural en el cine español de la posguerra (1936–1951),” 91–114; Monterde, “Lo rural como espacio metafórico,” in Gómez and Poyato, Profundidad de campo, 59–176; Little, “Otherness, Representation,” 438.

68. Delgado, “El arte de danzar sobre el abismo,” 221–30; Faulkner, A Cinema of Contradiction.

69. Lamikiz, “Ambiguous ‘Culture’,” 291–306.

70. Fernández de Rota, “La antropología gallega a debate,” 123–4. A multiplicity of Basque anthropological studies began to appear also with an opposite melancholic narrative of a “disappearing world” (see the contemporary works by Julio Caro Baroja, William Douglass, Davyd Greenwood, Marianne Heiberg and Joseba Zulaika).

71. Fernandez, “The Dilemmas of Provincial Culture,” 71–91.

72. Preston, “The Dilemma of Credibility,” 65–83; Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia.

73. Beramendi and Núñez, O nacionalismo galego, 223–30.

74. Beramendi, De Provincia a Nación, 1086–8.

75. Lucini, Veinte años de canción en España, 325.

76. Lamikiz, Sociability, Culture and Identity, 135–6.

77. Autobiographical testimonies in Juaristi, Cambio de destino, 117–20; Molina, Mario Onaindia, 47–8.

78. Manuel de la Sota, in Berriotxoa, Como un jardín, 305.

79. Hess, Reluctant Modernization; Greenwood, Unrewarding Wealth.

80. Garmendia, Historia de ETA, 45–9; Aranzadi, El escudo de Arquíloco, 176.

81. López, “Lo puro frente a lo contaminado,” 173–211.

82. Castells, “La arquitectura y la pintura vasca,” 47–9; Zulaika, Basque Violence.

83. Gorriarán and Agirre, Estética de la diferencia, 259, 267–8.

84. Touraine, El país contra el Estado, 13–39, 86–9; Hechter, Internal Colonialism.

85. Historical context in Núñez, Movimientos nacionalistas en Europa.

86. The Basque case, in Molina, “Lies of Our Fathers,” 296–319; the Galician case, in Miguez, Genocidal Genealogy of Francoism.

87. Núñez, “Nacionalismo español y franquismo: una visión general,” 21–36; id., “Nuevos y viejos nacionalistas,” 87.

88. Aguilar and Humbelaek, “Collective Memory and National Identity in Spanish Democracy,” 121–64. The notion of “exiled underground” in Ferrándiz, El pasado bajo tierra, 18–23.

89. Núñez, “Nuevos y viejos nacionalistas,” 68–73.

90. Basque-Navarrese Catholic Carlism channelled the most reactionary Spanish-Catholic political culture and astonishingly, it was re-interpreted by a new generation of extreme left-wing militants in the 1960s from a peasant and anti-capitalist standpoint that idealized their violent tradition: McClancy, Decline of Carlism.