Abstract
Revolutions have always exerted a certain fascination on contemporaries beyond the frontiers of the states in which they occurred. Thus, the stream of ‘tourists’ into Portugal became so steady in the course of the 1974–1976 ‘revolution of the carnations’ that Portuguese border guards turned away many would-be visitors who were suspected to be more interested in the vagaries of far-Left politics than the beaches of the Algarve. Depending on the degree of the insurgents’ success, the host nation was not always equally averse to the influx of foreign observers. And not all strangers were, by any means, sympathetic to the processes of radical social change they came to observe. Yet, whether out of a desire for fulfilment, learning experience or, perhaps, simply adventure, revolutions have consistently been focal points of foreigners’ attention.
That summer of 1936, as in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the roads of southern France were alive with dissident artists, intellectuals, poets and dreamers moving towards the Pyrenees in search of the Holy Grail. We did not seek it at Mont Salvat as the Cathars did, but beneath Barcelona’s Mont Tibidabo and in the foothills of Madrid’s Guadarrama Mountains, where The Revolution was to bring the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
Lois Orr (1979)
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Notes
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 58.
Apart from the openly partisan and somewhat uncritical accounts by Frank Mintz, L’Autogestion dans l’Espagne révolutionnaire (Paris: La Découverte, 1976), and
Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1975), the best works on the Catalan and Aragonese revolution are
Walther Bernecker, Anarchismus und Bürgerkrieg: Zur Geschichte der Sozialen Revolution in Spanien 1936–1939 (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1978);
Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), who is particularly lucid on the implication of the revolutionaries’ military policy; and
Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972). The latter volume is the best introduction to this topic from the overall perspective of social upheaval in the midst of civil war. A recent, more specialized study of one particular aspect is
Julián Casanova, Anarquismo y revolución en la sociedad rural aragonesa, 1936–1938 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1985).
Noam Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’, in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 23–158.
But this is symptomatic of virtually all writings on Spain under the Popular Front. Thus, even the historian Hywel Francis commits the ‘error’ of categorizing the Barcelona ‘May Days’ of 1937 as a ‘POUM rising’, 47 years after this myth was first propounded and exposed; see Hywel Francis, Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), p. 229.
Patrik von zur Mühlen, Spanien war ihre Hoffnung: Die deutsche Linke im spanischen Bürgerkrieg 1936 bis 1939 (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), p. 15 and passim.
Frigga Haug, ‘Memory Work’, in Frigga Haug et al. (eds), Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory (London: Verso, 1987), p. 40; emphasis added.
Willy Brandt, Links und frei: Mein Weg 1930–1950 (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1982), pp. 217–218.
John Langdon-Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades (New York: McBride, 1936), p. 90. All but the last ellipses are in the original text.
University of Michigan Library, Labadie Collection, Emma Goldman Collection of Papers — Emma Goldman, ‘My Second Visit to Spain: September 16th–November 6th, 1937’, typescript (4 March 1938), p. 1. In the quotation Goldman reminisces about her first visit to Republican Spain.
Paul Thalmann, Wo die Freiheit stirbt (Olten: Walter, 1974), p. 133.
Fenner Brockway, Workers’ Front (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), pp. 91–92.
Rolf Reventlow, Spanien in diesem Jahrhundert: Bürgerkrieg, Vorgeschichte und Auswirkungen (Vienna: Europa, 1968), p. 141.
‘Interview mit Franz Haiderer’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands (ed.), Für Spaniens Freiheit: Österreicher an der Seite der Spanischen Republik (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1986), p. 122.
Walter Gregory, The Shallow Grave (London: Gollancz, 1986), pp. 26–27.
Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 52.
Mary Low and Juan Breá, Red Spanish Notebook: The First Six Months of the Revolution and the Civil War (San Francisco: City Lights, 1979), p. 20.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), p. 5.
Frank Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 69.
Prince Hubertus Friedrich of Loewenstein, A Catholic in Republican Spain (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), p. 20.
H. Edward Knoblaugh, Correspondent in Spain (London: Sheed & Ward, 1937), p. 33.
However, the Englishman Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell learned the value of a badge and other symbolic means of communication when briefly arrested by the anarchist militia in Malaga. He was told to wear a British badge on his coat and was taught ‘the various salutes, so that all would be well with persons who did not recognise the British badge’. He added, ‘It is true that I procured a small Union Jack, and, as often as I remembered, wore it on my jacket when I was on the streets of Malaga, but from that day on I got more friendly greetings than sour looks, and felt quite safe personally, until the Rebels [the Francoist troops] entered’; see Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, My House in Málaga (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), pp. 118–120.
Paul A. Pickering, ‘Class Without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present, 122 (August 1986), 144–162.
Carl Marzani, in John Gerassi (ed.), The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39: An Oral History (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 146.
Cedric Salter, Try-Out in Spain (New York: Harper, 1943), p. 20.
Augustin Souchy, With the Peasants of Aragon (Minneapolis: Soil of Liberty, 1982), p. 97.
Cited in James Cortada (ed.), A City in War: American Views On Barcelona and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1985), p. 120. This book with a promising subtitle is essentially composed of nothing but United States Foreign Service communications to the Department of State. As a documentation of official American attitudes to the issues of revolution and civil war, however, they are rather useful, and indicate the hostile stance of Roosevelt’s administration.
University of Michigan Library, Labadie Collection, Lois and Charles Orr papers (UML LC ORR), Frank L. Denby, ‘An Interview with Charles Orr’, Paris, 15 July 1937. Typescript in folder: Orr, Charles, Writings 1937 July.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr, Spain 1936–1939: A Short History of the Spanish Revolution, unpublished manuscript, 1961, p. 1a.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 23 September 1936, p. 5. All letters and postcards can be found in various folders labelled ‘Correspondence’ unless indicated otherwise.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr, The Anarchist Millenium, unpublished manuscript, 1979, p. 3.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 12 November 1936. The reference to ‘Brea’ and ‘Mary’ allude to Mary Low and Juan Breá, authors of the Red Spanish Notebook, repeatedly quoted above. Mary Low was a close friend of Lois Orr, who worked together with her in the offices of the POUM and the Generality.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 12 November 1936. The reference to ‘Brea’ and ‘Mary’ allude to Mary Low and Juan Breá, authors of the Red Spanish Notebook, repeatedly quoted above. Mary Low was a close friend of Lois Orr, who worked together with her in the offices of the POUM and the Generality.
On the gender issue, see also Lois’ reference to the abundance of pornographic material: ‘Oh, these pamphlets tho! Nude nuns and dreadfully lewd looking priests, and everyone you see on a street car or in a park, men, women and children are reading the tripe.’ UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear daddy’, 2 November 1936, p. 3. For some stimulating comments on a matter which may, perhaps, throw some light on the seemingly paradoxical role of American cartoon characters in Catalan politics, see chapter 8 on ‘The Dialectics of Symbolic Inversion’ in Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), particularly pp. 142–148.
UML LC ORR — Charles Orr to ‘Dear Folks’, 8 December 1936, p. 1.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 4 March 1937, p. 1. One of these ‘nice people’ was Eileen Blair, George Orwell’s wife, who worked under Charles Orr in the English-language department of the POUM. The nominal head of this bureau was John McNair of the British Independent Labour Party.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Orrs’, 14 December 1936, p. 1; emphasis added.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 4 February 1937, p. 2.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Orrs’, 14 December 1936, p. 1.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 7 October 1936, p. 8.
UML LC ORR — Charles Orr to ‘Dear Culters’, 10 November 1936, pp. 10–11.
UML LC ORR — Charles Orr to ‘Dear Mother’, 10 March 1937, postcard.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Mother and Daddy’, 11 April 1937, p. 2.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Family’, 4 February 1937, p. 1.
UML LC ORR — Lois Orr to ‘Dear Mother and Daddy’, 11 April 1937, p. 2.
Charles, who was about ten years older than the 19-year-old Lois, at one point gave this somewhat paternalistic glimpse of her political maturation in Barcelona: ‘She has a tendency to go to extremes when she gets a new interest or theory — it sometimes seems to conservative old me. But she learns quickly. You should hear her worry about the world political situation! The role of the Anarchists in the revolution, marriage theory, dress, beards, sur-realism and a hundred things I never thought about before’; UML LC ORR — Charles Orr to ‘Dear Culters’, 10 November 1936, p. 12.
And, indeed, it appears that some key architects of the French Revolution were acutely aware of the impact of symbols on foreign perceptions of social revolution, for one of the considerations for the design of major representative structures was their potential impact on visitors from abroad; see Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 159.
Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Peter Schoettler, ‘Historians and Discourse Analysis’, History Workshop Journal, 27 (Spring 1989), 37–65.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’, New Left Review, 166 (1987), 82.
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
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© 2009 Gerd-Rainer Horn
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Horn, GR. (2009). The Language of Symbols and the Barriers of Language: Foreigners’ Perceptions of Social Revolution (Barcelona 1936–1937). In: Horn, GR. (eds) Letters from Barcelona. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234499_3
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