that the regime’s efforts merely to prevent his work entering Spain were deemed to be insufficient. The partisan accounts of recent Spanish history that were used to vindicate a brutal regime were, as a result of his writing, no longer sustainable. The principal task of the new department was to come up with more plausible and modernized versions. This inevitably involved the implicit recognition that its earlier accounts were untrue. Once the dam had been breached, of course, there was no going back. The subsequent attempts were even more easily ridiculed. In this sense, Herbert Southworth, who had once been a part of the pro-Republican group that lobbied for the Spanish Republic in the United States, would do more for the anti-Franco cause than any of his more famous friends. Long after they had been forgotten, he made his presence felt to the extent of being denominated the Franco regime’s public enemy number one.
Southworth struck this blow, and thus became a major figure in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, as a result of the publication in Paris in 1963 of his book,
El mito de la cruzada de Franco.
It was issued by Ediciones Ruedo Ibérico, the great publishing house of the Spanish anti-Franco exile run by an eccentric and massively well-read anarchist, José Martínez Guerricabeitia. Smuggled into Spain and soldclandestinely, Ruedo Ibérico’s books had enormous impact, particularly after the publication of a Spanish translation of Hugh Thomas’ classic work on the Spanish Civil War. From the first moments of the conspiracy that became the military coup of 18 July 1936, the rebels were falsifying their own history and that of their enemies. Hugh Thomas’ book recounted the history of the war in a readable and objective style – in itself a devastating blow for the partisans of what they called Franco’s crusade – and was therefore devoured hungrily by anyone who could get hold of a copy. Southworth’s book was infinitely less immediately popular, but much more devastating. It did not narrate the war but rather dismantled, line by line, the structures of lies that the Franco regime had erected to justify its existence. The consequence of the arrival in Spain of both books was an attempt by the then Minister of Information, the dynamic Manuel Fraga Iribarne, to seal the frontier against the arrival of more copies and to counteract the intellectual and moral impact of both – but especially of the Southworth book, for its corrosive effect on the regime’s self-image.
In fact, the book by Thomas had arrived first and had been smuggled into Spain in large quantities. Its success saw a tightening of frontier restrictions. Herbert’s book was sent to the Canary Islands, where the customs were much slacker and from there entry into the mainland was relatively easy. This meant that the price when it was finally sold, under the counter, in Spanish bookshops, was more than double that in France. The profit went to the smuggler and the bookseller. Herbert wrote to Jay Allen: ‘I have been writing for more than three years and I have not earned a single centime, a new or an old franc. I have not even recovered the money I advanced to publish the first book in Spanish. It has sold more than 3000 copies, which in view of the difficulties in getting it into Spain is not too bad.’ 1 Nevertheless, those three thousand copies that filtered in were enough to provoke the creation, within the Ministry of Information, of the special department under the name Sección de Estudios sobre la Guerra de España.
To direct it, Fraga chose a clever young functionary of the ministry, a chemist who had trained to be a Jesuit before leaving to marry, Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces. He came from a famous conservative family; his grandfather had been Minister of the Interior in the governmentsof the monarchy, his uncle had invented the autogiro and his father had been killed by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.
Southworth struck this blow, and thus became a major figure in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, as a result of the publication in Paris in 1963 of his book,
El mito de la cruzada de Franco.
It was issued by Ediciones Ruedo Ibérico, the great publishing house of the Spanish anti-Franco exile run by an eccentric and massively well-read anarchist, José Martínez Guerricabeitia. Smuggled into Spain and soldclandestinely, Ruedo Ibérico’s books had enormous impact, particularly after the publication of a Spanish translation of Hugh Thomas’ classic work on the Spanish Civil War. From the first moments of the conspiracy that became the military coup of 18 July 1936, the rebels were falsifying their own history and that of their enemies. Hugh Thomas’ book recounted the history of the war in a readable and objective style – in itself a devastating blow for the partisans of what they called Franco’s crusade – and was therefore devoured hungrily by anyone who could get hold of a copy. Southworth’s book was infinitely less immediately popular, but much more devastating. It did not narrate the war but rather dismantled, line by line, the structures of lies that the Franco regime had erected to justify its existence. The consequence of the arrival in Spain of both books was an attempt by the then Minister of Information, the dynamic Manuel Fraga Iribarne, to seal the frontier against the arrival of more copies and to counteract the intellectual and moral impact of both – but especially of the Southworth book, for its corrosive effect on the regime’s self-image.
In fact, the book by Thomas had arrived first and had been smuggled into Spain in large quantities. Its success saw a tightening of frontier restrictions. Herbert’s book was sent to the Canary Islands, where the customs were much slacker and from there entry into the mainland was relatively easy. This meant that the price when it was finally sold, under the counter, in Spanish bookshops, was more than double that in France. The profit went to the smuggler and the bookseller. Herbert wrote to Jay Allen: ‘I have been writing for more than three years and I have not earned a single centime, a new or an old franc. I have not even recovered the money I advanced to publish the first book in Spanish. It has sold more than 3000 copies, which in view of the difficulties in getting it into Spain is not too bad.’ 1 Nevertheless, those three thousand copies that filtered in were enough to provoke the creation, within the Ministry of Information, of the special department under the name Sección de Estudios sobre la Guerra de España.
To direct it, Fraga chose a clever young functionary of the ministry, a chemist who had trained to be a Jesuit before leaving to marry, Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces. He came from a famous conservative family; his grandfather had been Minister of the Interior in the governmentsof the monarchy, his uncle had invented the autogiro and his father had been killed by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.
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