After some hour work to edit a message my message is gone when I returned to my screen and the ominous sentence "No post specified" appeared.
And it is not the first time that arrives

In bad mood I start again.
Before starting my comments I give my links to not lose again my message...
http://www.rtbf.be/tv/thematique/documentaire/detail_retour-aux-sources-la-tragedie-des-brigades-internationales-en-2-volets?id=9300152
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/spanish-civil-war
https://www2.bc.edu/~heineman/maps/SpCW.html
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42660.The_Battle_for_Spain



Yes nad now already bedtime on the European peninsula...till tomorrow...

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul, just a suggestion but I've got myself into the habit, just before pressing send, of always highlighting the whole post and just doing ctrl-c ... so that if it does not actually send it's still there in temporary memory on the PC. Although anything long or containing links I've usually typed out in Word or Wordpad first.

Of course I don't always follow my own advice and often forget to copy .... and those occasions are always the ones when I get "no post specified". Grrrr indeed!

Meles meles wrote:

Paul, just a suggestion but I've got myself into the habit, just before pressing send, of always highlighting the whole post and just doing ctrl-c ... so that if it does not actually send it's still there in temporary memory on the PC. Although anything long or containing links I've usually typed out in Word or Wordpad first.

Of course I don't always follow my own advice and often forget to copy .... and those occasions are always the ones when I get "no post specified". Grrrr indeed!

 Thanks Meles meles for your recommendations;

Your friend Paul.

Seeing the documentary on the French language Belgian television about the "Tragédie des brigades internationales" and although I had a fair knowledge of the Spanish Civil War I learned a lot about the Communist interfighting as with the Communist/Anarchist POUM.
http://www.rtbf.be/tv/thematique/documentaire/detail_retour-aux-sources-la-tragedie-des-brigades-internationales-en-2-volets?id=9300152
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM

And the "no specified post " appeared again, Meles meles...

To be sure I start a new message

Kind regards, Paul.

In the time on the old BBC board we had also a discussion about the Spanish Civil War and after some 8 pages there was woman, who said: you know nothing about that war, it was too complex to be easely analysed. The split between the factions even superposed by other splits which occured even in opposed factions. The lady was claiming that she spoke by het rememberance of her Spanish parents...
And as I listened to the documentary that seems to be true, especially in the Communist camp,where there was a lot of infigthing due to the domination of the Stalinist Communists only organizing along the directives from Moscow. And then when with the accords of Munich Stalin saw that the Western democracies would do nothing to counter the Fascist tide from a Hitler, he let the Spanish Nationalists without support making all the political murders within the Communist Spanish parties in vain. As one sees it the Nationalist party of Franco seems a lot more coherent and focused on their aim of conquering the power over the whole of Spain.

One aside about the views of the Bolsheviks, the Reds in the in between the war period in Belgium. I learned these views through my parents, who lived in that period in the North of Belgium...
There was quite an abhorrence of the Communists in that time, even in such manner that most people understood that the Fascist parties came up as an opponent to those Bolsheviks, who had commited that many atrocities and who were the clear counterparts of the liberal society that they had know in Belgium until that time. And even in the Fifties when I was growning up, that same feeling was still prevalent. At least in our regions and perhaps feeded by propaganda...

All that to say that one can understand the hate between the two factions of the Spanish civil war. A fight for supremacy of the old guard of the traditional Spanish world over those godless Bolshevists. A fight of the good against the evil. And of course these Conservatives were strengthened by the other Fascist examples that they saw in the neighbourhood...

Kind regards, Paul.

Thankyou so much for the YouTube Paul, I’d never encountered that series before. I see that is was a 1983 Granada production, and in style it reminds me of the excellent 1974 "World at War" series produced by Thames Television. ITV (a British umbrella organisation for a group of independent TV companies) didn’t half produce some cracking good history documentaries, didn't they? No cgi, no over-acted reconstructions, nor any fatuous celeb presenters bouncing around like glove-puppets … just the measured tones of a narrator; clear, simple explanatory maps; lots of original photos/film footage; and an emphasis on the words of those people that were actually there at the time. I’ve watched the first episode … still five to go.

But thankyou also because, though I now live in French Catalonia just adjacent to Catalunya … I’m rather ashamed to admit that I have only the barest knowledge about the Spanish civil war. Although a part of France since the mid 17th century, the region where I live essentially identifies itself as Catalan. The Catalan language is taught in schools (as a second language after French) and is widely spoken generally, and of course many families actually resettled here from Spain around the time of the civil war. Locally, in 2009, the 70th anniversary of the "retirada" (the retreat or evacuation) was remembered in a big way. The retirada followed the final nationalist capture of Catalonia and the fall, after a desperate fight, of the last republican-held cities of Barcelona and Girona, and resulted in many thousands of refugees crossing into southern France. Most of these came through the few roads and passes into the French department of the Pyrénées Orientales, where I now live.

Somewhere I’ve got the 2009 special edition of the local Newspaper, "L'Independent", which printed lots of photos from the time. I’ll try and dig it out. But here’s one of the classic, oft-reproduced, iconic images from the time.



The Garcia family fled from Spain by the mountain pass that crosses into France (at 1500m) above Prats-de-Mollo. On 8 February 1939 the Dutch photographer, Roger Violet, took this photo of Mariano Garcia-Bamala, supporting his 6 year old daughter Alicia, who’d lost her left leg during the assault on Barcelona. The image has been reproduced many times, and it's also recently been rendered into a bronze sculpture, that stands in the village of La Vajol, not far from the E9 autoroute ... and so is yet another frontier marker on that particular route (see P's borders thread).



.... But I digress.

The French départments bordering NE Spain were initially overwhelmed by the numbers, and in the Pyrénées-Orientales numerous impromptu refugee camps sprang up on the deserted sandy beaches just over the frontier (at Argelès, St Cyprian and Barcarès). These soon turned into semi-official camps when first the local, then regional, then state, authorities moved in, desparately trying to provide food and medicine, to arrange for separated families to be reunited, and to find families and towns elsewhere in France who could help accommodate the huge numbers. Inevitably the French army was deployed to secure the frontier, to dis-arm the republican soldiers, to keep order, to forcibly separate men from women and children, to enforce de-lousing regimes etc, ..... and to generally try and protect France against all the communist agitators, fascist agitators, common criminals, chancers, smugglers, spies, spivs, ... and everything else the paranoid French government feared might be coming over the border.

But by September 1939 France found itself at war with Nazi Germany, and the French government, fearing communists and fascists alike, turned the refugee camps into "internment centres". Then France fell, the camps came under the control of Vichy France, and they became "prison camps". Eventually Germany took over the whole of southern France, the beach camps were broken up (1942) and all occupants were transferred to a regional, purpose built camp, located next to what is now Perpignan airport. From there the majority of the remaining inmates, their numbers augmented over the past couple of years by local political prisoners, jews, gypsies and other undersirables, were shipped off to concentration/extermination camps in Germany.

As with many aspects of its 20th century history France’s actions and inactions in regard to the Spanish civil war are often "problematic" to modern eyes (and I do mean that as an observation rather than as a criticism). But during the 1930s successive French governments - some lasting just days, others barely a few hours - struggled to hold the country together, as conflicting political parties repeatedly tried and failed to gain a concensus. There was a general fear of getting dragged into the Spanish civil war, and though the parties of the Left feared the rise of a fascist Spain, they feared antagonising the emerging fascist Germany too ... and while the Right hated the communists, they too feared France's age-old foe, Germany. I think that France, just like Spain, was in real danger of tearing itself apart. Some French support was given to the Spanish republicans - France allowed arms shipments from other countries through its territories - but she largely refused to supply arms herself. In the end though, once Barcelona had fallen, France, like Britain, was forced to accept the practical realities of the situation, and so officially recognised Franco’s Spain.

.... But sorry, those are all my own, rather parochial comments, mostly relating to the aftermath of the Spanish civil war as seen from southern France. As I say, I do really need to educate myself, and so am looking forward to the rest of that documentary series.

Meles meles,

".... But sorry, those are all my own, rather parochial comments, mostly relating to the aftermath of the Spanish civil war as seen from southern France. As I say, I do really need to educate myself, and so am looking forward to the rest of that documentary series."

"rather parochial comments"
No, no Meles...more of that...I am really interested...

When you describes the France from in between the wars you certainly have a point.

From my nearly 9 years on French historyboards I can say that I know something about French history and especially about the Thirties and WWII, and from all what you describes I can't but fully agree with you. As the gap between right and left movements...

And yes I read also about the Spanish refugees...in a rather indirect way...
I read the memories of a young soldier, who became later a correspondent for a local paper from Bruges. In fact his memories were spread over six! books...
After the 18 days campaign in Belgium, some Belgian soldiers moved straight across France till they were blocked in the South of France I suppose in the region that you mentioned. And they stayed there for more than a year under Vichy France. But as I read it, the Belgians were rather well incorporated in French families, especially on farms, to work on that farms. And they had enough food. At the end some pavement company from Bruges, who owned several trucks, was able to organize a trip to the South of France to evacuate the Belgian refugees. But now I remember that the author spoke also about the Spanish refugees, who were interned in camps and it seems that they were very bad treated and sometimes the Belgians shared a bit from their food with this poor people...

Kind regards and again thanks for your parochial stories...

Your friend, Paul.

Further to my post above, this again refers to matters at the very end of the civil war, and only really to the republicans and refugees that escaped into France in 1939 ... but Paul, you did ask.

These are a few of the photos that were published in the special supplement to "L'Independent" newspaper (Perpignan) on 20 Feb 2009, to commemorate La Retirada. The original photos are probably held by the regional archives office at Perpignan. As reproduced (by L'Independent) they didn't have much in the way of captions nor dates, so all the following comments/captions here are entirely my own:


Refugees fleeing into France (probably late January or early February 1939). This is the coast road between Cerbère (on the frontier) and Banyuls-sur-Mer about 20km further into France. I know it well, and frankly the view looks exactly the same today ...  the road is no wider, and the rail track is still just two lines ... although now, unlike then, the lines continue via a tunnel and link up with the Spanish rail network, and so these days it's a major international freight route. But in 1939 there were no through trains. 



Again almost certainly taken in the first or second weeks of Feb 1939, and I'm guessing this was taken on one of the tracks across the mountains somewhere near St Laurent-de-Cerdans or Prats-de-Mollo ... French soldiers searching refugees and dis-arming republican soldiers, before letting them proceed.



In the early days the refugees established impromptu camps on the deserted sandy beaches at Argeles, St Cyprian, and Barcarès ... all three places are now popular tourist resorts but then were just small fishing villages surrounded by mosquito-infested marshes, brackish lagoons and the wide empty Mediterranean beaches. 



But in September 1939 when France declared war on Germany, these impromptu refugee camps became "internment camps", for Spanish nationalists and fascists alike, plus any other "undesirables" of dubious loyalty. With the arrival of these regimented huts also came barbed-wire and watch-towers.

Eventually the beach camps were broken up and all the remaining inmates were transferred to Camp Joffre at Rivesaltes. This had been built in 1938 as a military base, but in 1940 was converted into an internment camp. But being conveniently close to the railway line into Perpignan, under Vichy France and then Nazi Germany, it eventually became a prison camp/concentration camp for the whole region, and finally the local transit centre for onward travel, one-way only, to the camps in Germany.

Incidentally the camp at Rivesaltes, Camp Joffre (Maréchal Joffre, a hero of WW1, was born in Rivesaltes) continued in use long after the war. During the 1962 Algerian war it functioned as a POW camp, and then after the war it was used as a resettlement camp for the Harkis (Algerian troops and their families who had remained loyal to France during the Algerian war of independence). Then in 1986 it was again pressed into use as a detainment centre for illegal immigrants entering France from Spain or directly from North Africa. As such it was only shut down in 2007. The site was then taken over by the regional government, who, after much prompting by various local groups, finally agreed to restore some of the remaining 1940s barracks.

These restored buildings are now the focus of a museum and memorial dedicated to both the Retirada and the Holocaust.

Kind regards, groetjes, et meilleurs voeux,

MM

"Further to my post above, this again refers to matters at the very end of the civil war, and only really to the republicans and refugees that escaped into France in 1939 ... but Paul, you did ask."

Meles meles, yes I asked...and I am so gratefull to read about these camps...I am quite interested in all these stories...in fact I am interested in all events related to history ...even in history "in statu nascendi"...comtemporary history you would say?

Your friend, Paul.

And I did some research in Google maps, Meles meles, to better see the geograpical locations we are talking about. Yes the surroundings of Perpignan...thanks to the names of the cities you mentioned...and yes Camp Joffre at Rivesaltes...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_de_Rivesaltes


And about the memorial:
http://www.memorialcamprivesaltes.eu/

Kind regards from Paul.

And this about the Memorial:
http://www.memorialcamprivesaltes.eu/46-l-espace-d-exposition-permanente.htm

Kind regards, Paul.

Further to my comments above about the Retirada, I’ve been doing some more reading ... mostly local printed stuff.

Following Franco’s final assault on Catalunya about half a million people, refugees and retreating republican soldiers alike, fled over the frontier into France during February 1939. My feeling is that the French government, post Munich Agreement, still had a head-in-the-sand attitude, and so had made absolutely no serious provision for this, far from unexpected, event. They were thus simply over-whelmed by the ensuing humanitarian disaster. The population of the Pyrénées-Orientales Department alone more than doubled in a week, and although generally the local populace seems to have been sympathetic, accommodating and desperate to help their fellow Catalans, nevertheless large refugee camps had to be hastily established throughout the region just to cope with the numbers. The French state was quick to secure the borders but was somewhat slower in dealing with the humanitarian side. The celebrated Catalan cellist Pao (Pablo) Casals, already living in exile in France, was one who threw himself into organising local humanitarian assistance. He wrote (February 1939):

"Shortly after arriving at Prades, I visited some of the concentration camps - there were a number nearby, at Rivesaltes, Vernet, Le Boulou, Septfonds, Argelès - where the Spanish refugees were confined. The scenes I witnessed might have been from Dante's Inferno. Tens of thousands of men and women and children were herded together like animals, penned in by barbed wire, housed - if one can call it that - in tents and crumbling shacks. There were no sanitation facilities nor provision for medical care. There was little water and barely enough food to keep the inmates from starvation. The camp at Argelès was typical. Here more than a hundred thousand refugees had been massed in open areas among sand dunes along the seashore. Though it was winter, they had been provided with no shelter whatsoever - many had burrowed holes in the wet sand to protect themselves from the pelting rains and bitter winds. The driftwood they gathered for fires to warm themselves was soon exhausted. Scores had perished from exposure, hunger and disease. At the time of my arrival the hospitals in Perpignan still overflowed with the sick and dying."


It seems that most women, children and the aged were moved out of the camps within two or three weeks, once local and regional humanitarian societies had got involved (that's from several survivor's statements as reported in a Spanish/Catalan TV documentary). Nevertheless this was too late for many: one of the memorials amongst the dunes at Argelès-sur-Mer alone lists the names of a hundred or so children who died there. The civilians were either redistributed to other camps in France, or to various requisitioned or voluntarily-offered hotels, warehouses, chateaux etc, mostly in the southern half of the country but in some cases far away in the north and north-east of France (then two day’s rail travel away). The disarmed republican army, together with most men of military age, however, remained interned in the vast camps on the Mediterranean beaches, which for several weeks were still little more than barbed wire compounds without shelter, water or sanitation. As a result some 11,000 men died from dysentery and other diseases, untreated battle injuries, and exposure. The camps were guarded mostly by colonial troops from Senegal and irregular Sipahis from North Africa, who, unused to the bitter conditions, suffered almost as much as the men they were guarding.


A Moroccan cavalryman stands guard at Argelès.

Meanwhile the vast plain surrounding the French military base just outside Perpignan, Camp Maréchal Joffre, was covered in armoured vehicles, guns, trucks, private cars, carts, bicycles, horses, mules, oxen and all the other transport and equipment that had been abandoned by the Republican army and refugees.

The first camp at Argelès had insufficient capacity, and so it was soon followed by others further along the beaches at St Cyprien (5km), and Barcarès (about 25km away to the north). Like Argelès these were both ancient villages, originally built on islands amongst the brackish lagoons and reedy marshes, well behind the deserted sandy beaches where the camps themselves were located. I used to live in St Cyprien: just on the edge of the old village. The surrounding fields (its all pasture, no crops) are barely above sea level, and while in summer they are nowadays covered with campsites, in winter they're frequently flooded. The well in our garden had permanent water just 2m down, which when we had it tested, was inevitably of rather poor quality contaminated by surrounding run-off and only good for watering the garden. Not surprisingly in 1939 the camp at St Cyprien - separated from the village by foetid, mosquito-infested marshes but still just downstream of the main centre of habitation - suffered a disproportionate number of deaths through disease. When I lived there (around 2005), in the next street to our own was a small park, barely bigger than the suburban gardens surrounding it, which, amongst the leaning pines and oleanders, had a large memorial. From memory it says that the park was on the site of a cemetery for the the nearby refugee/internment camp (probably the cemetry was located there as it was on slightly higher ground and above the water table). There are no individual grave markers, nor names given on the memorial, so I guess it was simply a mass grave (though doubtless, knowing French bureaucracy, the names of those interred there were recorded). Due to its insanitary conditions and the resulting prevalence of disease, the St Cyprien camp was shut down in the Autumn of 1939, but the camps at Argelès and Barcarès - now furnished with lines of regimented wooden barrack buildings, standpipes for water, trench latrines, and with the security bolstered by watchtowers - remained in use for several more years.


The camp on the beach at St Cyprien, March 1939.


An overall view in Feb 1939. The Argelès camp is in the fore and middle ground (divided by the prominent stream), the St Cyprien camp (not yet established) will soon be located at the top-right about 1km beyond the second stream (which is actually quite a big river, the Tech). The medieval villages of Argelès and St Cyprien are both just out of sight over to the left, being built on higher land than the shifting marshes and dunes along the seashore (for example the mouth of the River Tech still regularly moves from one year to the next, sometimes suddenly shifting by 500m or more over just a few weeks).

By July 1939 about a third of all the refugees in France had been persuaded to return to Spain … where many were immediately imprisoned and some were summarily executed. Many others were transported from France to Mexico, South America, the USSR and other host countries. Of those that remained in France, the men of military age were incorporated (sort of) into the French army, which was now starting conscription of Frenchmen.

Many of the battle-hardened republican veterans joined the French Foreign Legion. About half of the French troops deployed at Narvik (Norway) in Spring 1940 were actually Spanish. Others fought in the defence of France itself. Several hundred Spanish Republicans were taken off the beaches at Dunkerque by the Royal Navy in the final hours, members of a French army labour battalion who had taken up arms in the rearguard and fought with great valour against the Germans for a couple of days. Once landed in England, they were put into a heavily-guarded camp near Bournemouth by a nervous British government in case they started spreading bloody revolution and bomb-throwing among the genteel people of that town. They were transferred later to join several thousand French troops at Trentham Park in the Midlands, where they met up with the mostly-Spanish 13th Half-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, just back from Narvik. After a week or so, France having now capitulated, there was a proposal to move the 13th half brigade to French Morocco - which occasioned an immediate strike among the Spaniards, who feared that once they got there the Vichy authorities might herd them across the border into Spanish Morocco. So the Foreign Legion brigade, now under Allied command, instead ended up in Syria fighting Vichy French forces - including a lot of fellow Legionaries. They then went on to fight with distinction alongside the British 8th army against Rommel, notably at Bir Hakeim, west of Tobruk, in 1942.

These Spanish troops had good reason to be worried because the Vichy government later washed its hands of the Spanish republicans who had been serving as troops in northern France and who had been taken prisoner by the Germans. This allowed the Germans to declare them illegal combatants not covered by the Geneva Convention, and so send them off to Mauthausen. Of the 9,000 Spanish prisoners of the Germans less than 2,000 survived the war. A similar fate awaited any Spanish republican soldiers that were still interned at Argelès and Barcarès. First under the Vichy French and then (after 1942) directly under the Nazis, the beach camps were broken up and their occupants, now including jews, gypsies, communists and all other "undesirables", were transferred to Camp Joffre adjacent to Perpignan. From there they were steadily shipped off to the main French concentration camp a Drancy, or direct to Mauthausen in Germany. A lot of veteran republican soldiers also served in the local French resistance, particularly as many had family and useful contacts just over the border in neutral Spain.

Those Spanish republican soldiers that had escaped after Dunkerque and Narvik and had joined the Free French forces, later served under General Leclerc, and many of the "French" forces that liberated Paris in 1944 had originally been Spanish republicans. It has also been estimated that about 20% of the current population of the Pyrénées-Orientales department can trace a descent from someone that fled from Catalunya during La Retirada.

Thank you very much Meles meles for your well documented message about the Retirada. I read it all in detail.
Excuses for replying that late, but yesterday the whole evening doing research for the Tripartite negociations of August 1939 between Britain, France and the Soviet-Union...
http://passion-histoire.net/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=39163&start=15

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

I finally finished watching that ITV series, "The Spanish Civil War"  ... and that's not meant negatively, it’s just that a lack of time meant it took so long to watch the whole series. I thought it was very good, generally unbiased and even-handed in its handling of the issues, whilst not glossing over either controversies or atrocities. Thank you for posting it.

You mentioned discussions about the Spanish Civil War on the old BBC boards. Yes, I remember those, and as I recall there was a lot of discussion about whether Britain and France should have done more to support the Republican side, or indeed that they were both actually on the wrong side. I think it is certainly true that support of Britain and France for what was the legitimate democratically elected Republican government, might have given the fledgling Spanish democracy the boost it desperately needed to suppress the strongly conservative aristocratic and militariststic factions. But Britain and France chose to either act neutral and pressure the League of Nations into declaring an international blockade to prevent support getting to either side, … or in Britain's case actually colluded with the Nationalists. I was previously unaware that it was British Secret Intelligence, MI5, that flew Franco, in a British registered civilian plane, from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco so that he could start the military coup (Franco’s Moroccan troops were subsequently flown to mainland by the Luftwaffe).

I’m not sure about Britain, but in France, despite there being a lot of sympathy to the Republican cause, I think there was an over-riding fear that any French support might well either lead to direct French military involvement (and after the horrors of WW1 France in the 1930s, despite having a huge army, tended to be very Pacifist), as well as concerns about antagonising France’s old foe Germany. Before watching that series I did not fully appreciate just how strongly socialist was the Republican side. In Republican controlled areas of Spain the communists transformed the ancient aristocratically-owned haciendas into community-owned farms, and in the cities of Catalonia factories were run by workers' cooperatives, with wages paid as an allowance of food, clothing, housing etc. Moreover when the Anarchists gained control of Barcelona they proposed to abolish all money, wealth, property-ownership, rank (both civil and military) and indeed all central government … and they only failed to do so simply because, being anarchists, they didn’t believe in any government at all, and so refused to take any central control.

Faced with extreme anarchist actions like that, I can fully understand the reticence of even the most left-wing of France's governments to getting involved (even the USSR baulked at giving support to the Anarchists). Throughout the 1930s France was itself continually struggling to balance both the far right and the far left, so although many might have favoured the Spanish Republican cause, I don’t think any French government could have seriously contemplated getting involved.

Had they done so remains of course a big historical "what if". Had they got involved in July 1936 they might have nipped Franco’s coup in the bud or pre-empted any military involvement by Germany and Italy … and the subsequent Republican Government would not have been so reliant on Soviet aid, and so on brutal communist politicians (like Negrin) who perverted and poisoned the Republican movement. But it might also have caused France itself to completely implode into its own civil war, no?

Thank you very much, Meles meles, for your equilibrated (oops, I see now that that word don't exist in English ...), your balanced message (as usual...)


I just wanted to reply to your first paragraph before I read your second about France.

Yes I had the impression, that in the Anglo-Saxon world, but I can be wrong, there was a kind of a myth (propaganda?)
about the brave struggle of the "legal" government against the Nationalists...and indeed a lot of the foreign contingent were from Anglo-Saxon origin, including writers as Orwell and Hemingway...today the people from artist business seems also left orientated...

But I have again the impression of what I read that in France, and I can again be wrong, that the separation between right and left was much bigger than in the UK?

But you answered, nearly the same as what I wanted to pretend, based on 8 years of reading French history fora...
"Throughout the 1930s France was itself continually struggling to balance both the far right and the far left, so although many might have favoured the Spanish Republican cause, I don’t think any French government could have seriously contemplated getting involved."
It was not that severe as in Germany but the division was nearly as nasty...

"Had they done so remains of course a big historical "what if". Had they got involved in July 1936 they might have nipped Franco’s coup in the bud or pre-empted any military involvement by Germany and Italy … and the subsequent Republican Government would not have been so reliant on Soviet aid, and so on brutal communist politicians (like Negrin) who perverted and poisoned the Republican movement. But it might also have caused France itself to completely implode into its own civil war, no?"


"But it might also have caused France itself to completely implode into its own civil war, no?"

You can be right. In fact after all what I read on the French messageboards, but again I can perhaps misinterpreted the information...
I will start a thread about the question on my French messageboard to see, what they think about it. Compared with Historum it is a better guided board. Although also with some 13 thousand members, the discussions are more balanced and polite and many contributors, in fact some five that I know , are also on Historum.

Kind regards from your friend, Paul.

I'll post this here because, although it's not really on-topic, it may still be of wider interest ... and it is still a reminder that not all those who fled from the Spanish Civil War into France arrived as desperate, destitute and demoralised refugees, carrying their few remaining possessions on their backs.

A week ago I had a young couple from Barcelona staying here. As soon as they'd arrived and we'd said our greetings, the chap explained that they'd come here specifically because his family (Paretas) had once owned the house that is now my home. He explained that his great-grandfather had owned a successful import/export business in Barcelona during the 1920s and 30s, but then seeing how the situation in Spain was developing at that time, he'd bought properties outside of the family's main home in central  Barcelona, to act as refuges should the need arrive: he had apparently always been known as the clever brother with canny foresight. He bought one house in remote countryside up in the hills on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees and the other here, just over the border into France.  

This was likely to have been around 1937 during the early part of the civil war and a couple of years before the bloody siege and eventual fall of Barcelona to Franco's Nationalists in January 1939 which precipitated la retirada - the sudden massive exodus of refugees and defeated Republican soldiers over the Pyrénées into France. As we've already discussed above, this caused a humanitarian disaster as the population of the French Pyrénées-Orientales department more than doubled between the last week in January and the first two weeks of February in 1939, resulting in many of the refugees being forcibly confined in appalling conditions on the open Mediterranean beaches with neither shelter, sanitation, food nor medical services, and in the very depths of winter. By this time however, the Paretas family had already installed themselves here in what is now my home.

I had already discovered some of the house's history but did not know about this chapter, although it fitted in with what I suspected. The house itself was built as a weekend retreat/hunting-lodge for the second generation of the family of Jean Bardou, an entrepreneur who had come up with the idea of selling books of pre-cut, mild-tasting, quality-made, cigarette rolling-papers, which he had patented in 1849 and then sold under the popular brandname of 'JOB' cigarette papers. Jean Bardou died in 1852 but the company was taken over by his son Pierre who further developed the brand, massively expanded production, and made an absolute fortune from the business (the JOB brand still exists, now manufactured in Toulouse I think, although no longer owned by the Bardou family). It was Pierre Bardou - now a very wealthy industrialist and art connoisseur with family contacts in the highest levels of French society - who towards the end of his life, commissioned the Danish architect Viggo Dorph-Petersen, to build grand châteaux for each of his children: Joseph was given the Château d'Aubiry in Cérèt (built 1894–1900), Camille was given the Château Ducup St Paul in Canet-en-Roussillon (built 1892–1910) and Jeanne was given the Château de Valmy in Argelès-sur-Mer (built 1888–1906). Sometime around 1895–1900 Dorph-Petersen was also responsible for building, in the hills some 20km from Château d'Aubiry, the rather more humble hunting lodge that is now my home.


Home sweet home.

This hunting lodge was built on a long-established farm, which Pierre Bardou had bought in its entirety and then, at least as I understand it, had sub-let part of the land along with the old house back to the original farming family, who thus became his rent-paying tenants. The ancient farm house, which is now my neighbour's home, was built in the mid-17th century but is on foundations/undercroft that are at least several hundred years older. The Bardou family were still the owners of both these properties until sometime after the end of WW1, possibly even into the 1920s (some years ago I spoke to an elderly lady in the village who had been born in the old farmhouse when her grand-parents were the tenants - but I didn't like to ask her exact age). Sometime after WW1 the estate was split up, with some parcels of land sold off and the two principal buildings - the old farm house and the fin-de-siecle hunting lodge each still with generous land attached - separated into two private properties. I had undertood that my part had then been run as an orchard between the wars (there are still some very big, old fruit trees hidden in what is now regrown forest) and that then, sometime before WW2, it had been taken over by a family from Barcelona, but that was all I knew.

It is now clear that it was the Paretas family who came here as exiles from the Spanish Civil War, but then were trapped here for the whole of WW2. One can can only speculate how difficult it must have been at this time. The great-grandfather was likely sympathetic to the Spanish Republican cause and so would have been viewed with suspicion by the authorites under the Vichy-French and Nazi regimes. As a family they probably still had relations, friends and old business colleagues in neutral Spain, and so might very well have been suspected of being involved in getting downed allied airmen into neutral Spain - the border is only 15km away and I know of at least one house in the village that has a hidden cellar that was used in this way as a safe house. When great-grandfather Paretas died some years after the war, the property apparently passed to a niece who kept it into the 1960s: and my guest showed me a photo of his own father, then aged about ten, in the garden here.

As he said his family have rather bittersweet memories of the house: thankful for the safe haven it offered and even, for the generation in the years after the war, for many happy summer holidays spent here. But also it is still apparently remembered by his oldest relatives as a place of exile, for the times of hardship and as symbolic of what they suffered and lost.

Thank you so much MM for the story of your house and the indirect events going with it. I read it with the greatest interest and perhaps once I will come over to see it all with my own eyes.

Kind regards, Paul.

An interesting encounter indeed - and kudos to your guest too for taking enough of an interest in his own family's history to visit the house. It reminds me of trips as a child traipsing around the hinterlands of Bunclody and the Wexford-Carlow borderlands with my mother identifying houses and landmarks associated with my great-grandparents' lives. Their people were part of a vibrant Protestant community and a social order that is now all but forgotten in the region and it struck me, even as a child, how reticent the inheritors of their cultural remnants - their houses, memorials, churches, businesses and farms - were to even acknowledge the actual history of their landscape. I believe this is no longer the case - time has moved on and the bitterest legacies of colonial strife have finally been extinguished - but I am still left to wonder how much local knowledge survives at all of the people who initially shaped these communities among those who are now the custodians of their artefacts. You are indebted to your guest, I feel.

Your story prompts a question though. What was France's official stance on the Spanish War? Surely Sr Paretas must have been naturalised in order to be able to purchase the property, and I'm wondering if this might be seen as evidence of a French partiality to the Republicans? Which of course would tend to be contradicted by the French treatment of other refugees with such sympathies who crossed the border during those years. I am familiar with British officialdom's ambivalence to the issue at the time, though its reticence to "take sides" was arguably less a political stance and more probably associated with facilitating huge transfers of financial assets from Spanish to British financial organisations at the time, a flow that grew exponentially as both sides in Spain saw the conflict protract beyond expectations and the country's economy unravel. Was this also the French attitude - accept any and all Spanish investment from individuals, regardless of which side they were on?

nordmann wrote:

What was France's official stance on the Spanish War?

Throughout the 1930s France was itself continually struggling to balance both the far right and the far left, as successive French governments - some lasting just days, others barely a few hours - fought to hold their own country together, as conflicting political parties repeatedly tried and failed to gain a national concensus. In the early stages of the war the French leftist "Popular Front" government under Prime Minister Léon Blum, while expressing sympathy for the republicans and voicing fears that success of Nationalist forces in Spain would result in the creation of an ally state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, an alliance that would nearly encircle France, bowed to French right-wing politicians and agreed not send any direct support to the Republicans, and in August 1936 France signed the Non-Intervention Agreement. However the Blum government did in fact covertly provide aircraft to the Republicans and allowed aircraft to freely pass from France into Spain if they were bought in other countries. Even when this covert support ended after just a few months, the possibility of French intervention against the Nationalists remained a serious possibility. In 1938 German intelligence apparently reported to Franco that the French military was engaging in open discussions about direct intervention in the war through Catalonia. And remember some 10,000 French volunteers joined the International Brigade fighting on the Republican side, which was many times the number of volunteers from, for example, Britain.

But despite the widespread sympathy for the Republican cause, I think there was an over-riding popular fear that any French support might well lead to direct French military involvement (and after the horrors of WW1, France in the 1930s, despite having a huge army, tended to be very Pacifist), as well as concerns about antagonising France’s old foe Germany. There was a general fear of getting dragged into the Spanish civil war, and though the parties of the Left feared the rise of a fascist Spain, they feared antagonising the emerging fascist Germany too - and while the Right hated the communists, they too feared France's age-old foe, Germany.

Don't forget also that politically the Spanish Republican government became more and more hard-line communist in outlook as the war progressed and they were forced to become increasingly reliant on Soviet aid. Influenced by brutal communist politicians like Negrin, in Republican-controlled areas of Spain they transformed the ancient aristocratically-owned haciendas into community-owned farms, and during the later stages of the war factories in Catalonia were run by workers' cooperatives, with wages paid as an allowance of food, clothing, housing etc. When Barcelona was beseiged by the Nationalist forces (1938) the city became controlled, not just by communists but by full out anarchists, who promptly proposed to abolish all money, wealth, property-ownership, rank (both civil and military) and indeed all central government … and they only failed to do so simply because, being anarchists, they didn’t believe in any government at all, and so refused to take overall government control. Faced with extreme communist mentality like that, I can fully understand the reticence of even the most left-wing of France's governments to getting involved (and even the USSR baulked at giving support to the Anarchists).

nordmann wrote:

Surely Sr Paretas must have been naturalised in order to be able to purchase the property .....

Yes I wondered about that too. I really do not know how things like that worked then but I suspect, as so often, it was a case of money easing the path. A further question would then be, as a foreign national, assuming he did not have French citizenship, how did they manage with rationing, identy papers etc, during Vichy and Nazi occupation? NB I had understood they'd stayed in France during the war but now I'm not so certain about this. They may have returned to neutral Spain after the fall of France, and this in turn suggests the family had nothing to fear from the nationalist regime: they were afterall a wealthy, business-owning family, certainly unlikely to have communist leanings (but such matters of historical political affinity are still a very much a sensitive matter today). However we only managed to speak about all this very briefly while they were here for a couple of days. We have though swapped email addresses to maintain correspondence and I have an article written by a local historian about the house's history to send him, so I hope to find out much more.

My understanding is that citizenship questions in France are handled by the local prefectures. I'm not sure if this was the case in the 1930s but I suspect that it is a long-standing feature dating back to the 19th century. Furthermore, the prefectures exercise considerably autonomy in this role in terms of background-checking, recommendations and even approval of applications etc. The ministry of the interior is quite delegatory in this respect. It's an example of how a seemingly centralised state such as France can sometimes be quite de-centralised in practice. 

With regard to French partiality towards one side or the other in the Spanish Civil War (weren't there 4 sides in the conflict as one point?) then the personal sympathies of the local prefects would not necessarily be carbon copies of those of the minister in Paris - e.g. René Marx Dormoy in Blum's government. The prefect of Pyrénées-Orientales from 1936 to 1940 was Raoul Didkowski, a capable civil servant who was ostensibly sympathetic to Blum's Front Populaire. He was, however, later appointed head of the Sûreté by Marshal Petain when the latter assumed office in 1940. Police work didn't seem to suit Didkowski who only held the position for less then a month before returning to prefect work - this time in Isere. There are conflicting accounts of his activities during that time. Some suggest that he was a zealous enforcer of the policies of the Vichy regime while other suggest differently. What is the case, though, is that following the German occupation of southern France in 1942 he became increasingly opposed to the occupying forces resulting in his resignation from the prefecture in 1943 and subsequent arrest by the Gestapo and deportation to prison in Bohemia. He survived the war and returned to France where he died in 1973.

An unusual and complex character (Raoul Didkowski was of both Polish and protestant descent) I suspect that like many civil servants at the time he tried to do a professional job and remain as politically neutral as possible in very difficult circumstances. The fact that he was appointed by Blum, promoted by Petain, preferred by Pierre Laval but later arrested by the Gestapo would suggest that this was indeed the case.

Vizzer wrote:

My understanding is that citizenship questions in France are handled by the local prefectures ....

This was indeed true up until fairly recently, but post Brexit - and I speak as one trying to regularise my own French residence status - this is now a central government matter. However, as with everything else 'official', it is something that you are expected to manage yourself, on-line, from your own computer ... which not only assumes you have a PC, and are PC savvy, but that you have a good internet connection (I do but only because I have an expensive satellite connection). There are telephone help-lines available, but these are no help when, like here, there is no longer any fixed-line telephone connection (Orange refuse to maintain the line), nor any mobile network coverage (no companies seem to be interested in extending the coverage here).

In the 1930s however, yes, it was still probably a local, prefectural matter and then I expect it was probably much quicker to get it all sorted - at least one way or the other - fair or not.

But we digress....

Part 3 of a documentary, The Scots who fought Franco. This part is about the journey to Spain and across the Pyrenees. Cannot make out the name of the French town at the 49/50sec mark:

Triceratops wrote:

Cannot make out the name of the French town at the 49/50sec mark

It's a pretty long border between France and Spain. The western end (adjacent to the Basque Country), however, was generally nationalist territory from very early on and remained so throughout the conflict. They're likely, therefore, to have crossed over further east (adjacent to Andorra and Catalonia). I'd guess from what he said that it was somewhere like Céret.

Indeed, and someone does mention arriving in Figueres, which is across the border from Cérèt on the road that goes from Perpignan, via Ceret/la Boulou, la Jonquera (the frontier), then via Figueres and Girona, and so down to Barcelona. But I'm confused as to why these Scottish guys had to clamber over the mountains just to get into Spain - why didn't they take the bus, or even just hitch-hike along the main road from Perpignan to Barcelona? France didn't stop western Republican-supporting volunteers going to fight in Spain, and indeed thousands of French citizens joined the Republican army. Even at the very end of the civil war the French-Spanish border, at least at the eastern Catalan end, largely remained open to civillians travelling in both directions.

Ceret sounds right, Meles.

This is a report on a commemorative walk over the Pyrenees in 2006

Pyrenees Commemoration

In 'British Volunteers for Liberty' Bill Alexander described how the procedures for getting into Spain changed after this.

"The land route over the Pyrenees was most generally used. The small parties were collected into larger groups in Sète, Ceret, Perpignan and other towns within easy reach of the frontier. The francs given in Paris were taken back; with some volunteers the appeal of the wine had overcome their scruples and they had less than 200 francs left. Some groups were given a pair of rope-soled slippers - alpargatas - soon to become common footwear in Spain. Then, at night, in buses, lorries, and taxis, the groups were taken to the foothills of the Pyrenees. In darkness, with no smoking and no talking, the march began, in single file, up the mountains."



Even with the tight and committeed organisation of the French, many dangers still lay ahead. Sometimes they were arrested by police before they even got to the foothills of the Pyrenees. Sometimes they had to abandon the attempt to cross and lie low for a few days until the threat of arrest by border guards had passed. All the Brigaders describe a very arduous and hazardous climb to reach the Spanish border. A few volunteers didn't make it. They were killed by fascist border guards, or missed their footing and fell to their deaths from the high peaks. Some even died from exhaustion.

Those posts are interesting, Trike, as they suggest that there were considerable official obstacles put in place to prevent European volunteers trying to join up with the Republic Spanish forces ... which I didn't realise was the case. I assume these controls were imposed by French border security forces, as surely the Republicans, in control of their side of the Catalan-French frontier for nearly the whole duration of the civil war, would surely just have happily waved these reinforcements through.

But just to be clear, at the south-eastern end of the Pyrenees -  that is between Perpignan/Ceret/Boulou and north Catalonia - there isn't much of any physical barrier: the mountains are really not that high, they're more just wooded hills as they descend down to the sea. They are admittedly difficult to traverse if you don't know your way, but they're certainly not impenetrable to outsiders without local help and there are plenty of villages scattered throughout the area all with established tracks to each other. It is nothing like the Alps. Indeed in the past an entire French army managed to sneak its way into Spain/Aragon (albeit with some local help) using this 'hidden' route, rather than via the two regular routes: either the road to the north via the pass of Perthuis, or that to the south along the open road that clings to the coast.

The modern E9 autoroute - carried on some impressive bridges and carved into the valley walls - traverses at high level the rocky pass between la Boulou and la Jonquera; while the old winding medieval road goes through the small frontier town of La Perthuis, hidden deep in the valley below beneath the modern viaducts. Meanwhile the ancient Roman Via Hispania climbs up more steeply on the other side of the same valley and then at the summit (marked by a triumphal arch, or rather the remains of) it officially changed its name to the Via Domitia, which then continued into Gaul and thence onwards to Rome. All of these well-known routes across the SE end of the Pyrenees I can imagine were then (1930s) as well-monitored, or not, as they are today. But there are many other smaller routes across these wooded hills. I once, in search of a particular bar/restaurant that was supposed to be found in a quaint village on the French side of the frontier, got lost and ended up well over the border into Spain, indeed half-way to Girona, having driven miles/kms, back and forth across the frontier, along perfectly good minor roads linking small villages hidden amongst the wooded hills.

I assume therefore that stopping European volunteers crossing into Spain was French government policy, and so I'm guessing this was in order to be seen as being strictly neutral, in accordance with the International Non-Intervention Agreement which France had signed up to in August 1936. Nevertheless as I say, over 10,000 Frenchmen managed to get over the border during the war to help the Republican cause.

Meles meles wrote:

Nevertheless as I say, over 10,000 Frenchmen managed to get over the border during the war to help the Republican cause.

As an aside Meles, the 9th Company of the Armoured Infantry Regiment of the Free French 2nd Armoured Division was composed of Spanish Republican soldiers. Nicknamed "La Nueve" they took part in the Liberation of Paris. There were only about 150 of them, so not in the same scale as the French volunteers to Spain.

Triceratops wrote:

Nicknamed "La Nueve" they took part in the Liberation of Paris. There were only about 150 of them, so not in the same scale as the French volunteers to Spain.

Nevertheless it is likely that many of those 150 Republican soldiers had originally joined the French Foreign Legion as already battle-hardened soldiers, though now dis-possessed following the final fall of Republican Spain. About half of the French Foreign Legion troops deployed at Narvik (Norway) in Spring 1940 were actually Spanish. Other Spanish Republican soldiers fought in the defence of France itself (June 1940), for example the several hundred Spanish soldiers, members of a lowly French labour battalion, who took up arms in the rearguard and fought with great valour against the Germans for a couple of days, and who were taken off the beaches at Dunkirk by the Royal Navy only in the very final hours of the evacuation.

Yet despite all their valiant efforts the Spanish Republicans were not generally well-treated by Britain. Once they'd been evacuated from Dunkirk the Spanish soldiers were separated from rescued French and Belgian troops, and then put into a heavily-guarded camp near Bournemouth by a nervous British government, presumably in case they started spreading bloody revolution and bomb-throwing among the genteel people of that town. They were only later transferred to join the several thousand French troops then accommodated at Trentham Park in the Midlands, where they met up with the mostly-Spanish 13th Half-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, just back from Narvik. But after a week or so - France having now capitulated - there was a proposal to move the whole lot of them to French Morocco - which occasioned an immediate strike among the Spaniards, who feared that once they got there the Vichy authorities might herd them across the border into Spanish Morocco. So the Foreign Legion brigade, now under Allied command, instead ended up in Syria fighting Vichy French forces - including a lot of fellow Legionaries. They then went on to fight with distinction alongside the British 8th army against Rommel, notably at Bir Hakeim, west of Tobruk, in 1942.

Those Spanish troops in Britain had very good reason to be worried about their official status because the Vichy government later completely washed its hands of the Spanish Republicans who had been serving as troops in northern France and who had been taken prisoner by the Germans. This allowed the Germans to declare them illegal combatants not covered by the Geneva Convention, and so send them off to Mauthausen. Of the 9,000 Spanish prisoners of the Germans less than 2,000 survived the war.

Good info there, Meles.