The Spanish Civil War: A Connecting Story

This scheme of work has recently been updated and can be found in full on the SHP's Curriculum PATHS project page here: https://padlet.com/cpaths/shp-curriculum-paths-sharing-hub-67fifmslrhyo1e0x

Something a little bit different.

A few years ago, I set about planning and writing a scheme of work on the Spanish Civil War. To the best of my knowledge (then and now), this is not something that's typically taught in British schools. So why Spain?

For the purposes of Soviet foreign policy, the Spanish Civil War is hugely significant. Stalin had the distinction of being the only European leader who militarily backed the Spanish Republic (although his motives have been, quite rightly, doubted by all commentators since). Spain, like Russia, was also exceptional in being one of the only European countries to experience a full-blown social revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. And like Russia, this coincided with a devastating civil war.

More widely, the story of Spain during its civil war, 1936-1939, has the potential to connect to the wider story of European (and world) history between the end of the first, and the start of the second, world war.

Rationale and Approach

The scheme of work, which is linked in full here, is framed by the (not very catchy) enquiry question "Why do historians consider the Spanish Civil War to be significant?".

The enquiry hugs closely to the idea of significance as a second-order concept, whilst examining aspects of historical interpretation, causation, and consequence. In this way, it fits fairly neatly with the approach to significance as a "meta-concept" that permeates other second-order concepts in History teaching.

I set the enquiry around the interpretations of three historians. Two are relatively sympathetic to the Republican (democratic/left-wing/liberal) side in the Civil War (Paul Preston and Helen Graham), and one extremely critical of the Republicans and rather troublingly sympathetic to the Nationalist (far-right/clerical/fascist) side in the Civil War (Stanley Paine).

We had recently moved in our GCSE teaching to the Inter-War unit, spanning 1918-1939. We would begin teaching this in Year 10. But students needed a key grounding in a number of themes first.

These, I realised, could be addressed by a short, focused examination of the Spanish Civil War in Year 9, which connected almost all of the major trends in European politics and society in the interwar period (rather bafflingly, the exam-board specification and textbooks for our GCSE Inter-War unit barely touched on a huge multi-national, ideologically grounded and potentially genocidal war raging in Europe in the three years before World War Two broke out).

The themes illuminated by this study of the Spanish Civil War include:

• Dictatorship: What were dictatorships in the interwar period and why did they emerge?
• (Extremist) Ideology: What was the clash of ideologies and how did this play out in interwar Europe?
• Total War: How did mass mobilisation and changes in technology, especially aerial bombardment, affect how wars were fought, who was targeted, and how conflict was perceived?
• Human Rights and Terror: How did conflict and revolutionary upheaval lead to the mass repression of civilians, and how did this contribute to social and political change?
• International Relations: How did foreign intervention in conflict by, and indirect conflict between, major powers including the USSR, Germany, and Italy, affect international relations in the pre-World War Two world?
• (Non-)Intervention: How did policies of appeasement and non-intervention strengthen Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism?

Lessons and Core Pedagogy

The lessons, slightly adapted from when I taught them a few years back, run through a number of key moments and experiences of the Spanish Civil War. There are six lessons in total:

1. What makes historians consider the Spanish Civil War significant?
2. How "unique" was Spain in 1930s Europe?
3. What can San Rafael tell us about violence and terror?
4. Why did international intervention decide the Spanish Civil War?
5. Why did people in 1936 consider Spain worth fighting for?
6. Why is Guernica still considered significant?

Within each of these lessons, students are invited to make a judgement about the nature of the significance - here meant primarily as perceived importance to people at the time. I followed a basically linguistic approach, using a vocabulary grid:

Lesson 1 invites students to consider the nature of civil war, as a concept, linking back in time to the English and American civil wars, and forwards to the present-day civil war in Syria, before introducing the historians, interpretative basis, and conceptualisation of significance which underpin the unit.

Lesson 2, picking up on Stanley Paine's contention that Spain's civil war made it "unique" in western Europe in the 1930s, compares the situation in Spain to that of other European countries, asking students to come up with a judgement on its "unique-ness" on the eve of war in 1936.

Lesson 3 hones in on one of countless examples of civil war atrocities and mass graves in Spain, with a mass burial site at San Rafael, in Malaga (for an informative short documentary, see here). Beginning with an inference-building task around an archaeological sketch of the mass grave at San Rafael, it unpicks the story of Malaga's war to uncover the nature and significance of terror against civilians in the Spanish Civil War, linking to Paul Preston's contention that this could be termed a "Holocaust" and akin to genocidal terror in other contexts.

Lesson 4 relates directly to the intervention of the USSR (which under Stalin "supported" Republican Spain), as well as those of its fascist adversaries, Italy and Germany, and the non-intervention of Britain, France and the USA. It proposes, following Helen Graham, that it was international (non-)intervention that decided the war, returning to the question of its significance in relation to different sides in the war (spoiler alert - it was a boon for the Nationalists and disaster for the Republicans). In a broader sense, the lesson picks at a point which is vital to understanding the inter-war period, namely that fascist powers used the Spanish Civil War to both test the resolve of Europe's democracies and ready their own war machines.

Lesson 5 complicates the picture of international non-intervention by pointing out that, while Britain, France, and the USA refused to come to the Spanish Republicans' aid, many individuals chose to fight for and defend Spain as international volunteers for a number of different reasons. The lesson presents a range of sources from such diverse groups as European Communists to Black American activists, feminists, and anti-fascists in the arts. Why was Spain so significant to them?

Lesson 6 focuses on one of the most iconic and devastating points of the Spanish Civil War - the destruction of Guernica. Starting with Picasso's iconic painting of the atrocity, it unpicks the contemporary and then later significance of the event, inviting students to consider it as an early example of aerial bombardment in Europe before highlighting the limitations of this interpretation (in fact, Madrid and Barcelona, and before them, Abyssinia, had been extensively bombed already).

Further Reading

Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2005)

Paul Preston, The Destruction of Guernica, HarperPress (2012)

Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge, Harper Perennial (2006)

Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, HarperCollins (2008)

Stanley Paine, The Spanish Civil War, Cambridge (2012)