"la Virtud De La Palabra": Manuel Azaña's Diaries of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The fact that the Presidency of the Republic and the Spanish Civil War came together at virtually the same time in Azaña's life left him with almost no outlet for his talents as a political orator, and with no constitutional power, because of the lack of a parliamentary structure in the wartime Republic. Azaña's enforced isolation from active politics, and his own early pessimism about the outcome of the war, lend a peculiar note of enhanced consciousness to his diaries of this period, whereby he believed that he was able to perceive things about the war that others could not. This belief impelled him to continue writing, although with diminishing fluency and purpose in the last year of the war: "la virtud de la palabra" could only be sustained as long as Azaña could believe in his hopes for peace to be restored to the Republic.