The Highway,1 March 1939
When General Franco raised his rebellion in July, 1936, he threw a spanner into the works of a machine which was travelling in a fairly well-defined direction. How seriously he jammed it is still uncertain.
The revolution of 1931 had got rid of the Spanish monarchy but had failed to solve any of the country’s fundamental economic problems. One of its effects, however, had been to create an atmosphere of liberalism and free speech in which ideas hitherto frowned upon could circulate widely. From then onwards it was clear to many observers that civil war in Spain was inevitable. The decisive moment came when a Government which could roughly be described as ‘left’ was returned by a rather narrow majority at the elections of February, 1936. This Government – the Government of the Popular Front – was not by any means under the control of extremists. It did not precipitate a crisis by violence towards its political opponents; on the contrary, it actually weakened itself by its moderation. A more rigidly ‘left’ Government would have dealt earlier with the military plot which everyone knew was being prepared, and would probably have made some promise of independence to the Arabs in Spanish Morocco, thus preventing them from throwing in their lot with Franco. Nevertheless the Government’s programme of reform menaced the big landowners and the Church, as any radical reform was bound to do. In the existing state of Spain it was not possible to move nearer to a real democracy without colliding with powerful vested interests. Consequently, the mere appearance of the Popular Front Government was enough to raise the most difficult problem of our time: the problem of making fundamental changes by democratic methods.
Parliamentary democracy, and especially the party system, developed in a period when no dispute between the different factions was really irreconcilable. Whigs and tories, or liberals and conservatives, are conducting what is in effect a family quarrel, and they will abide by one another’s decisions; but when the issue is, for instance, between capitalism and socialism, the case is altered. Actually, in slightly varying guises, the same situation has arisen over and over again. A democratically elected government proceeds to make radical reforms; it is acting perfectly legally, but its opponents ‘won’t play’; they rise in rebellion, either by open violence, as in Spain, or, more usually, by financial sabotage. The peculiarity of this case was that the Spanish Government fought back.
The war has now lasted two-and-a-half years and caused perhaps a million deaths, besides unheard-of-misery. How much damage has it done to the cause of democracy? One has only to consider the possibilities of modern war, the kind of things that governments will have to do to hold their peoples together, to feel very doubtful whether there will be much democracy left anywhere after several years of ‘all-in’ warfare between great nations. Yet it is a fact that the Spanish war, in nearly every way so terrible, has been a hopeful portent in this respect. In Government Spain both the forms and the spirit of democracy have survived to an extent that no one would have foreseen; it would even be true to say that during the first year of the war they were developing.
I was in Catalonia and Aragón from Christmas, 1936, until about the middle of the following year. To be in Spain at that time was a strange and moving experience, because you had before you the spectacle of a people that knew what it wanted, a people facing destiny with its eyes open. The rebellion had plunged the country into chaos and the Government nominally in power at the outbreak of war had acted supinely; if the Spanish people were saved, it had got to be by their own effort. It is not an exaggeration to say that practically the whole resistance of the opening months was the direct and conscious action of the ordinary people in the street, via their trade unions and political organisations. Transport and major industries had devolved directly into the hands of the workers; the militias which had to bear the brunt of the fighting were voluntary organisations growing out of the trade unions. There was plenty of incompetence, of course, but also there were astonishing feats of improvisation. The fields were tilled, trains ran, life away from the fighting line was for the most part peaceful and orderly, and the troops, though poorly armed, were well fed and cared for. With all this there was a spirit of tolerance, a freedom of speech and the press, which no one would have thought possible in time of war. Naturally the social atmosphere changed, in some ways for the worse, as time went on. The country settled down to a long war; there were internal political struggles which resulted in power passing from the hands of socialists and anarchists into the hands of communists, and from the hands of communists into the hands of radical republicans; conscription was imposed and censorship tightened up – two inevitable evils of modern war. But the essentially voluntary spirit of the opening months has never disappeared, and it will have important after-effects.
It would be childish to suppose that a Government victory could have instantly brought a democratic regime into existence. Democracy, as we understand it in Western Europe, is not immediately workable in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain will be when the war is over. Certainly any Government which triumphs over Franco will be of liberal tendency, if only because it will have to sweep away the power of the great landowners and most if not all of the power of the Church. But the task of governing the whole of Spain will be completely different from that of governing the present loyal fraction. There will be large dissident minorities and enormous problems of reconstruction; inevitably this implies a transition period during which the régime will be democratic chiefly in name. On the other hand, if Franco wins even the name will be abandoned. He has made perfectly clear his intention of setting up a corporative state on the Italian model – that is to say, a state in which the majority of people are openly and cynically excluded from having any voice in affairs.
And yet the situation may be less desperate than it looks. Obviously if Franco wins the immediate prospects are not hopeful; but the long-term effects of a Franco victory are hard to foresee, because a dictator in Franco’s position would almost certainly have to depend on foreign support. And if the Government can win, there is reason to think that the evil results necessarily following on civil war may disappear quite rapidly. Wars are normally fought by soldiers who are either conscripts or professionals, but who in either case are essentially in the position of victims and who have only a very dim idea as to what they are fighting about. One could not possibly say the same of the armies of Government Spain. Instead of the usual process of conscripts being fed into a military machine, a civilian people has voluntarily organised itself into an army. It is the psychological after-effects of this that may make a return to democracy more easy.
It was impossible to travel in Spain in early 1937 without feeling that the civil war, amid all its frightful evil, was acting as an educational force. If men were suffering, they were also learning. Scores of thousands of ordinary people had been forced into positions of responsibility and command which a few months earlier they would never have dreamed of. Hundreds of thousands of people found themselves thinking, with an intensity which would hardly have been possible in normal times, about economic theories and political principles. Words like fascism, communism, democracy, socialism, Trotskyism, anarchism, which for the vast mass of human beings are nothing but words, were being eagerly discussed and thought out by men who only yesterday had been illiterate peasants or overworked machine-hands. There was a huge intellectual ferment, a sudden expansion of consciousness. It must be set down to the credit side of the war, a small offset against the death and suffering, and it is doubtful whether it can be completely stamped out, even under a dictatorship.
It is true that things have not fallen out as we expected them to do at that time. To begin with, up till the summer of 1937 everyone in Government Spain took it as a thing assured that the Government was going to win. I would be far from saying that the Government is beaten even now, but the fact is that a Government victory cannot any longer be regarded as certain. Secondly, great numbers of people took it for granted that the war would be followed by a definitely revolutionary movement in the direction of socialism. That possibility has receded. Given a Government victory, it seems much likelier that Spain will develop into a capitalist republic of the type of France than into a socialist state. What seems certain, however, is that no regression to a semi-feudal, priest-ridden régime of the kind that existed up to 1931 or, indeed, up to 1936, is now possible. Such régimes, by their nature, depend upon a general apathy and ignorance which no longer exist in Spain. The people have seen and learned too much. At the lowest estimate, there are several million people who have become impregnated with ideas which make them bad material for an authoritarian state. If Franco wins, he will hold Spain’s development back, but probably only so long as it pays some foreign power to keep him in place. Shooting and imprisoning his political opponents will not help him; there will be too many of them. The desire for liberty, for knowledge, and for a decent standard of living has spread far too widely to be killed by obscurantism or persecution. If that is so, the slaughter and suffering which accompany a modern civil war may not have been altogether wasted.
1. The Highway was subtitled A Review of Adult Education and the Journal of the Workers Educational Association. W. E. Williams, editor of a special number, called ‘Democracy at Work’, had written to Orwell, 22 November 1938, asking if he could contribute an article with this title. A note preceded the article: ‘Two at least of Mr. Orwell’s books are familiar to W.E.A. members: The Road to Wigan Pier, and Down and Out in London and Paris. This article was written before Catalonia collapsed.’ Various dates for the collapse can be used. Thomas has a map showing the advances made by Nationalist forces in the campaign for Catalonia, December 1938–January 1939 (870); Barcelona was occupied on 26 January 1939; Nationalist troops reached the French border at all points by 10 February (873, 881). Sir William Emrys Williams (1896-1977) was Chief Editor and Director of Penguin Books, 1935-65. He was also, from 1934-40, Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education; Director of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, 1941-5, and the Bureau of Current Affairs, 1946-51. He was so closely associated with the Pelican series that he was known in-house as ‘Pelican Bill’. He can be seen in Rodrigo Moynihan’s painting of the Penguin Editors (reproduced in ThePenguin Story, 1956) and on p. 26 of Fifty Penguin Years (1985).