"Art in the Time of Authoritarianism", a review essay in Foreign Affairs on Jeremy Treglown's Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936 (January / February 2014)

"Art in the Time of Authoritarianism", a review essay in Foreign Affairs on Jeremy Treglown's Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936 (January / February 2014)
Civil Society in a broad sense
2014

January 2014

A review essay by Víctor Pérez-Díaz has been published in Foreign Affairs (January/February 2014 Issue).

 

Art in the Time of Authoritarianism. Spain's Cultural Success Under Franco

Víctor Pérez-Díaz

 

Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936. By Jeremy Treglown. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 320 pp. $30.00.

Seventy-five years after its conclusion, the Spanish Civil War can sometimes seem like a river of blood that led inexorably to the sea of horrors that was World War II. But Spain’s battle was also a devastating conflict in its own right, killing approximately 500,000 people. The war, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, pitted the Republicans, loyal to the existing government, against the Nationalists, a rightist rebel coalition led by General Francisco Franco. Franco’s initial coup failed but left the country militarily and politically divided. The Nationalists eventually won, and Franco ruled Spain from 1939 until his death, in 1975.

The war, so often misunderstood as a mere prelude to World War II, is also frequently miscast as a simple story of good versus evil, a fight between democrats and fascists. In fact, neither side in the struggle could honestly claim the mantle of democracy. Franco, of course, made no such attempt: he was proudly authoritarian. As for the Republicans, although they paid lip service to democratic principles and tried to practice them, their side devolved into disorder and lawlessness during the war, and anarchists and communists came to dominate their ranks.

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