■ Freddy GOMEZ
FOLIES D’ESPAGNE (Spanish Follies)
Ombres et lumières d’un anarchisme de guerre (Shadows and Lights of Anarchism in War)
L’échappée, “Dans le feu de l’action,” 2025, 384 p.
“I write only to be reread.”
Walter Benjamin, Conversation with André Gide.
PDF available on the source website A contretemps: Spanish Civil War, social war
Let’s say, for convenience’s sake, that it was a little over thirty years ago. Let’s say I was in my twenties and was just coming out of my shell, very late in life. That is, from a long adolescence and a modest family background where both cultural and political deserts reigned. Let’s say, finally, that there was this fundamental encounter with a couple of friends that made me veer off course and glimpse the shores of the continent of Anarchy—and its eldest daughter: the Spanish Revolution. Let’s admit, above all, that I didn’t understand much about this great human fresco and that, petrified by my ignorance, I decided to remedy it by reading everything I could get my hands on. My first purchase was as random as it was unfortunate, a paperback soberly titled La Guerre d’Espagne (The Spanish War) by a certain Guy Hermet [1]. Proud of my find, I presented it to my friends, who grimaced: I wasn’t sure I would find anything in it to help me understand the issues raised by those three years of civil war. Nor was I sure I would encounter the Revolution…
Years later, I briefly revisited this book, published in March 1989. It oozes mandarin-like posturing and academicism, in which the Spanish Civil War is summarized as follows: on its tortuous path to national unity and liberal democracy, Spain was torn apart during a period seen as the “dramatic catching up of a historical delay.” With the unfortunate corollary of excesses committed by “extremists on both the left and the right”… The historian Hermet seems to see in the libertarian aim an exoticism that is both lofty and terrifying; in Aragon, “the hegemony of the most enlightened currents of anarchism means that property and currency are simply abolished in certain places.” In this “somewhat forced social transformation,” a “rather hallucinatory moral puritanism” reigns, while elsewhere, in southern Andalusia for example, “new highway bandits become civil guards who have taken to the bush and survive by stealing from the surrounding area.” According to Hermet, “the rather terrifying revolutionary exuberance of the anarchists” did everything to undermine the anti-fascist republican bulwark. Worse still, “the reign of the workers’ militias did not hinder or even contribute to the murderous fury that struck so-called loyalist Spain during the first months of the civil war. Above all, Hermet-the-pious seems particularly haunted by the anti-religious “holocaust” – the “greatest anti-clerical massacre since that of revolutionary France and then Mexico after 1911” – to which he devotes many pages. So much for the detailed overview of this specialist in the history of democracies and populism. So much for this appetizer, which could have vaccinated me against “anarchist extremism.” Fortunately, what followed was quite different.
Liquidating yesterday’s utopias
“Enlightened,” “hallucinatory,” ‘holocaust’… What are these “follies of Spain” that could push a political observer of Hermet’s stature into such outrageous excesses? A clue? Hermet is a regular contributor to Catholica, a journal of political and religious reflection. This is a perfectly legitimate inclination, but one that somewhat conditions his view of people and their struggles. Despite his statistical sources and his honorary degree recognized by his peers at Madrid’s Alma Mater, the historian remains an ideologue. He is a foot soldier for whom history is a path, often bumpy but inevitably upward, where order and reason, often on the side of the powerful, clash in a battle endlessly replayed against the unreasonableness of the brutalized or manipulated masses. Once these moments of murderous “madness” have been purged, passions die down and settle; then, on a still-warm mass grave, the victors promote a spirit of harmony through a great ecumenical forgiveness—or a global business plan. ” In the aftermath of Franco’s death, writes Freddy Gomez, the “democratic transition” was born out of a pact negotiated by an institutional left eager to enter the political arena and a right wing that was still Francoist but keen not to leave it. […] Two years after Franco’s death, commentators fascinated by the Spanish model were able to rejoice: the war was finally over. And indeed it was, with this pact implying, if not silence, as has been wrongly claimed, then at least the forgetting of old quarrels and, even more so, on the part of historians, a resolutely objective approach to the contemporary history of Spain. “Resolutely objective approach” could have been written in italics, so much does its responsible and dispassionate format conceal a charge: that of liquidating the utopias of yesterday in order to render them unavailable for today’s struggles. Deprived of memory, a people is like a goldfish swimming around in circles. For sharks of the worst kind, it’s then open bar.
Memory, then! Memory above all! But which memory? The Spanish memory of 1936-1939 is a remarkably dense canvas. It was the primary reason for the existence of the magazine À contretemps, from the early 2000s until 2014 in its paper form, then in the digital format in which these lines appear. We will not insult the reader by introducing its main contributor: Freddy Gomez. We will just point out the rather comical position of the undersigned, who is in turn committed to cataloging… a collection of reviews.
Reviewing is a strange critical exercise: it is both autonomous and linked to the text to which it refers. It is capable of provoking its own mise en abîme, from which a new review will emerge. Here we are, at the heart of a retroactive loop consisting of a sample of 35 long reading notes collected in a collection with an unsettling title: Folies d’Espagne: ombres et lumières d’un anarchisme de guerre (Follies of Spain: shadows and lights of wartime anarchism). It begins with a “tomb,” that of Durruti, and ends with an “imposture,” that of Jorge Martínez Reverte, “journalistic commentator and approximate essayist.” Suffice it to say that the tone is set: that of precise and sharp ballistics sifting through the brief revolutionary summer, the war years, the anti-Franco struggle, and the democratic transition. In just under four decades, Freddy Gomez weighs and sifts through a multitude of circumstantial events, between collective uprisings and tactical choices, as part of the Spanish people, on their own soil or in exile, attempt to overcome the historical inevitability of their subjugation.
Stalinist-Republican executive
For anyone with even a passing interest in this social war, these Folies d’Espagne are an essential read. Regular readers of À contretemps know that Freddy Gomez is a formidable writer. Through his knowledge, precise down to the smallest details of the great libertarian fresco, through his art of bringing to light and problematizing often painful blind spots, through his expression that ranges from the art of flesh-and-blood portraiture to twilight poetry. Through his rare ability to handle situated subjectivism and critical objectivism. Reviewing a work by Francisco Carrasquer, a former militiaman in the Durruti column who became an essayist and translator, and thus a bearer of Spanish revolutionary memory, Freddy Gomez compliments him on his “skillful juxtaposition of knowledge and sensitivity.” We believe we are not mistaken in saying that Gomez’s pen is dipped in the same inkwell.
An important clarification: although most of the books referred to in the reviews compiled here were published in Spanish, it is not at all necessary to have read them in order to grasp their essence. Freddy Gomez’s texts should be taken as short essays that seek to unravel the most complex and painful knots of what turned out to be, for anarchists, an “immediate and definitive conflict between utopia and the reality principle.”
Pressing and digging where it hurts. Not out of sadism, but because it is precisely in these poorly healed—or too quickly closed—wounds of the past that lie the still-hot and cumbersome remnants of what was known as “war anarchism.” War on all fronts, open or latent, frontal or treacherous: against the fascist enemy, the republican ally of circumstance, the Stalinist purger.
From the moment the libertarian dynamic feeds on the irreducible intuition that nothing good for the people will happen until power (political, economic, coercive, etc.) has been abolished, it irrevocably exposes itself to a multiplicity of mortal enemies from across the political spectrum. In times of war, this iron law can only bring its iron to incandescence.
One of the most painful lessons of these Folies d’Espagne lies in the book’s ruthless diagnosis: while the bourgeois bloc will always prefer Hitler to the Popular Front, circumstances may lead its avatar—the “republican bloc”—to bet on Stalin to sweep away the risk of anarchist contagion. Thus, the “Stalinist-Republican” executive methodically stifled the gains of the libertarian revolution and, in the same breath, liquidated the revolutionary Marxist and anti-Stalinist militants of the POUM. 1937 was a terrible year of purges, in Russia as in Spain.
Anti-fascism, an absolute abstraction
If the classic revolutionary agenda involves, in its inaugural moment, a struggle against the state and the propertied class, what should be done when armed conflict is triggered, not by revolutionaries, but by fascists? What should be done when the revolution unfolds only in the spaces liberated by the state’s rout? What should be done when the “rebels” are the brownshirts and the anarchists find themselves objectively forced to defend the failing legal order? From the outset, Spanish “war anarchism” found itself in a revolutionary situation, faced with a fait accompli. Everything happened quickly: on July 17, 1936, the putschists rose up in Spanish Morocco; two days later, in Barcelona and Madrid, the military was defeated. In Catalonia, the CNT and the FAI began to set up anti-fascist militias, while the land was taken back by the peasants and industry was collectivized.
War and revolution, war or revolution: in the summer of 1936, this seismic diptych was a source of euphoric passions, but also of disturbing vertigo. Freddy Gomez sums up the dilemma facing the actors of the time:
“From the outset, this revolution took the strange form of resistance to an anti-republican military coup. In other words, it did not take the form envisaged by the anarchists of a mass uprising for social emancipation, but that of a popular uprising with motivations as contradictory as could be, on the one hand, the defense of democratic legitimacy undermined by the coup leaders and, on the other, the belief that crushing the crusaders of the new order only made sense if it allowed the old democratic order to be subverted.
In a text entitled Monologue intérieur sur une révolution empêchée (Inner Monologue on a Thwarted Revolution), praising the book Ascaso y Zaragoza by the aforementioned Francisco Carrasquer, Freddy Gomez examines the failure that the anarchist revolution seems to have brought upon itself at a time when the winds of history were, for once, favorable: “We must agree: when it was possible to deliver the coup de grâce, anarchism decided, out of fear of the void and fear of itself, to keep the dying bourgeois Republic on life support. In the name of an absolute abstraction: anti-fascism, that machine for destroying class struggle. No one will deny that the CNT leadership set this trap for itself, because it alone was in a position to decide which path to follow. Of course, this judgment will later be qualified by the fact that the CNT, irregularly established on Spanish territory, may not have felt it had sufficient weight to continue playing the revolutionary part. But that doesn’t really matter, and nothing prevents us from imagining another scenario a posteriori. Rather than sending four ministers to endorse Largo Caballero’s government and accepting the militarization of the militias in October 1936, the CNT, particularly in Catalonia, could have adopted a form of critical support for the Republican government, but without rallying to it institutionally. By acting in this way, autonomously in short, it would have been in a position, at that moment and given its fighting strength, to demand weapons for its militias and recognition of its numerous agrarian communities. Only such a position would have enabled it to wage war and revolution simultaneously, but above all to avoid the compromises, betrayals, and dirty tricks that were to come, such as those embodied by the “special courts of the Republic,” which were particularly “effective in matters of clandestine prisons and summary executions,” the Stalinist mercenaries of the Military Investigation Service (SIM) had a field day, under the guise of anti-fascism, in repressing the revolutionaries.
Demystifying, always
While there is no question of handing out good or bad marks in these Folies d’Espagne, the arrangement of these reviews as a series of chronicles allows us to shed light, from multiple angles, “the extraordinary complexity of the Spanish Revolution” and its aftermath, but also to demystify the romantic anarchist gesture and some of its fighting heroes (from Durruti to… Rouillan), and to demystify overly galvanizing or simplistic interpretations of history (for example, revolutionary elites quick to collaborate with the republican state and, conversely, a pure and spontaneous base; or “that programmatic crap of militarized Marxism-Leninism”). In short, demystifying in order to make history on a human scale—because, paradoxically, it is when history accelerates and places ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances that historians under orders will attempt to freeze it into an often one-sided and impoverished narrative. It is therefore important not to let them take control.
The “anti-fascist front” is constantly changing. It was there yesterday, it will be there tomorrow. In a time of legitimate shared fear, it brings together resistance movements – even those from historically antagonistic camps. Once the “republican” barrier has been overcome, a mixture of stupor and bitterness inevitably takes hold of even the most radical activists. The impression is that although evil has been neutralized, everything still remains to be done. Tirelessly. As if, once again, the opportunity had been missed. If there is one major benefit of these Spanish Follies – and of the Revolution they served – it is that they allow us to reconnect with “the clear awareness, once forcefully expressed by its most seasoned fighters, that fascism and the Republic had to be swept away in order for their chains to fall.”
The challenge seems all the more daunting given that, from our perspective in these troubled times, utopia has never seemed so distant. All the more reason to stay the course. In times of war as in times of peace—the other name for social war.
Sébastien NAVARRO
Notes
[1] Guy Hermet, La Guerre d’Espagne, Points-Histoire, 1989.