New English Weekly, 24 November 1938
Professor Allison Peers, though a Franco partisan and of late rather an acrimonious one, is a writer who can be taken seriously. He is also, I gather, a Catholic, and he is quite naturally and rightly concerned about the fate of the Church in Spain. No one would blame him for being angry when churches are burned and priests murdered or driven into exile. But I think it is a pity that he has not looked a little more deeply into the reasons why these things happen.
In recounting the various persecutions of the Church in Spain, from the Middle Ages onward, he traces four main causes. The first three are the struggle between Church and King, the struggle between Church and State, and the liberal anticlericalism of the nineteenth century. The last is the ‘development of what is broadly termed Communism, i.e., a number of related but not identical proletarian movements, one common factor of which is disbelief in, and denial of, God’. All church-burning, priest-shooting and anticlerical violence generally are supposed to have their roots in Communism and its Spanish variant, Anarchism, which are inseparable from ‘hatred of God’. It is not, Professor Peers thinks, a question of hostility to a corrupt church, but of ‘a cold, calculated, determined attempt to destroy institutional religion throughout the country’.
Now, it is no use denying that churches have been destroyed all over Government Spain. Various Government partisans, in their efforts to make their cause respectable, have pretended that churches were only demolished when they had been used as fortresses in the street fighting at the beginning of the war. This is merely a lie. Churches were destroyed everywhere, in town and village, and except for a few Protestant churches none were allowed to open and hold services till about August, 1937. It is also useless to deny that both Anarchism and Marxian Socialism are hostile to all religion. But this does not really tell us why the Spanish churches were destroyed. Professor Peers’s Catalonia Infelix2 made it clear that he understands the internal political situation in Government Spain a great deal better than most writers on the Spanish War, and there are two facts bearing on this question which he is probably aware of. One is the fact that during the present war the Russian Government has used its influence in Spain against and not for anticlerical violence and revolutionary extremism generally. The other is that the sacking of churches happened during the early period when the proletariat were in control, and the churches began to re-open and the priests to come out of hiding, when the Caballero Government fell and the middle class was back in the saddle. In other words the anticlerical movement, in its violent form, is a popular movement and a native Spanish movement. It has its roots not in Marx or Bakunin,3 but in the condition of the Spanish people themselves.
In Catalonia and Aragón, in the first year of war, there were two things that impressed me. One was the apparent absence of any religious feeling whatever among the mass of the people. Admittedly at the time it might have been dangerous to admit openly to religious belief – still, one cannot be altogether deceived about a thing like that. The second was the fact that most of the wrecked or damaged churches that I saw were new ones; their predecessors had been burnt down in earlier disturbances. And this raises the thought, when was the last church burnt down in England? Probably not since Cromwell. A mob of English farm hands sacking the parish church would be something next door to unthinkable. Why? Because at present the conditions of class warfare simply do not exist in England. In Spain, for a century past, millions of people had had to live in conditions that were beyond bearing. Over huge tracts of country peasants who were serfs in everything but name worked enormous hours for wages of sixpence a day. In these conditions you get something that we have not got in England, a real hatred of the status quo, a real willingness to kill and burn. But the Church was part of the status quo; its influence was on the side of the wealthy. In many villages the huge garish church, with the cluster of miserable mud huts surrounding it, must have seemed the visible symbol of property. Naturally, Catholic writers have of late been denying this. The Church was not corrupt, it was anything but wealthy, the priests were often good Republicans, etc., etc. The answer is that the Spanish common people, whose opinion on this matter is worth something, did not think so. In the eyes of at any rate very many of them, the Church was simply a racket and the priest, the boss and the landlord were all of a piece. The national church had lost its hold on them because it had failed in its job. Catholics would probably do their Church a better service by facing this fact than by tracing everything to mere wickedness, or to Moscow, which persecutes its own religious believers but has its reasons for being slightly pro-clerical elsewhere.
General O’Duffy’s adventures in Spain do seem in one way to have resembled a crusade, in that they were a frightful muddle and led to nothing in particular. Otherwise his book does not tell one much. For the most part it consists of the usual vapid tributes to General Franco (‘the great leader and patriot, General Franco, at the head of the Nationalist Movement, composed of all that is great and noble in Spanish national life, fighting for Christian civilization’, etc., etc.) and the usual ignorant misrepresentations of what is happening on the other side. General O’Duffy’s information is so sketchy that he even gets the names of some of the Spanish trade unions and political parties wrong. Franco propaganda is often less irritating than the rather subtler type of lie that has been evolved by the other side, but I confess to getting tired of that story of the ‘Russian troops’ (it is not recorded whether they had snow on their boots4) who are supposed to have fought on the Madrid front.
After what I saw in Spain, and what I have read about it in England, I understand why Sir Walter Raleigh burned his History of the World.5 If
The truth is great and will prevail
When none cares whether it prevail or not,6
then the sooner people stop feeling strongly about this Spanish struggle, the better it will be. At present the atmosphere of lies that surrounds every aspect of it is suffocating. Meanwhile O’Duffy s is a badly written and uninteresting book.
Orwell’s review drew protests from both authors. On 4 December General O’Duffy wrote to the editor of New English Weekly, asking that his letter not be published, but describing Orwell’s review as scurrilous. The word ‘review’ is underlined and placed in single quotation marks, evidently to indicate an anomalous, to him, use of the word. His book had, he said, received twenty four favourable reviews and only one other (in a ‘Communist organ) that was critical. He enclosed copies of typical reviews and claimed that his book had ‘a record circulation here & abroad’, strange if as Orwell claimed, the book was ‘an ignorant representation and badly written. The letter is marked ‘Came while you were in Africa and was evidently not sent to Orwell at the time, but it was answered. O’Duffy replied to the effect that the editor’s letter merely added insult to injury, and he asked that his name be removed from New English Weekly’s circulation list.
Professor Peers’s letter was published on 8 December 1938. He made thee points: he was not a Roman Catholic; he was not a ‘Franco partisan, but had maintained that the Spanish conflict could be resolved permanently only by agreement; his conclusions as to ‘why these things happen were not the product of a visit of a few months but of twenty years’ study of many aspects of Spanish life. Orwell’s response, headed ‘Spanish Clericalism, was published in the New English Weekly on 22 December 1938:
Sir, – I am very sorry to see that I have hurt Professor Peers’ feelings. I did not mean to do so. But perhaps I had better answer the three points he raises:
1. I only said that I ‘gathered’ that Professor Peers was a Catholic. My reason was simply that he is much more friendly in his attitude to the Catholic Church than is usual in non-Catholics, even including Anglicans. But I freely admit that his not being a Catholic makes his testimony in favour of the Spanish Church stronger.
2. I described Professor Peers as ‘a Franco partisan and of late rather an acrimonious one’. I do not think Professor Peers would deny that the tone of The Church in Spain is a good deal more bitter than that of Catalonia Infelix. As to the question of partisanship, Professor Peers claims to be impartial on the ground that he has ‘continually maintained… that the only solution to the Spanish conflict that can be permanent is a solution by agreement’. Well, I should regard that as being pro-Franco. After all, Franco is, at least technically, a rebel. What should we say of a person who suggested a ‘solution by agreement’ between the burglar and the policeman? We should say that he was at any rate to some extent pro-burglar. But I never for an instant meant to suggest that Professor Peers was unfair or dishonest. When I read Catalonia Infelix, I regarded it as a book written from the Franco standpoint but written with extreme fair-mindedness. I believe I said something to this effect in a short review that I did of it. Incidentally, it may amuse Professor Peers to learn that I have been in trouble in ‘left’ circles for not attacking him more severely. 3. I quite agree that Professor Peers knows infinitely more about the Church in Spain, and everything else in Spain, than I am ever likely to know. But I think that his explanation of modern anti-clericalism is altogether too simple to be true, and I do not see why my own observations, small as they are, should not be advanced as evidence.
1. Gen. Eoin O’Duffy (1892-1944) led an Irish Fascist movement, the Blue Shirts, founded by William Cosgrave (1880-1965), President of Eire until 1932. Most of O’Dufly s men in Spain were Blue Shirts. They fought for Franco. See Thomas, 592 and 602.
2. See pp. 257–8.
3. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814–76), Russian anarchist and political writer who opposed Karl Marx.
4. Orwell refers to one of the famous, and more incongruous, myths of World War I. At a critical period on the Western Front, rumours abounded that Russian troops were being transferred there from the Eastern Front. The ‘evidence’ purported to be sightings of Russian troops travelling in darkened trains from the north of Britain ‘with snow on their boots’.
5. This was written by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?–1618) when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London; it was published in 1614. Orwell writes of Raleigh’s imprisonment and his History in ‘As I Please,’ 10, 4 February 1944 (2416), not included in the extract below.
6. ‘Magna est Veritas’, lines 9-10, by Coventry Patmore (1823-96).