The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was an ideological conflict and, as such, saw extensive use of propaganda. Domestically the war involved a clash between a traditional order of the Catholic Church (represented by the army under General Francisco Franco [1892-1975]) and a more popular conception of public life (represented by the forces of the Republican government in Madrid). Abroad it was seen as a confrontation between fascism and democracy. The attitude of an international community that had the power to send aid and volunteers or ignore the war was so important that each camp resorted to written and audiovisual propaganda on a massive scale. The press and film companies were also intent on providing as much information as possible. Seldom have so many images of a domestic conflict been published internationally. Foreign journalists whose images played a part in forming opinion during and after the war include the photographer Robert Capa (1913-1954) and the writers George Orwell (1903-1950) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). The war also spurred artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) to paint Guernica (1937), his famous protest against the bombing of civilians. Images of the war lived on long after the end of the conflict and became enduring icons of antiwar propaganda.
When Franco’s military rebellion against the Republican government broke out in July 1936, freelance photographers rushed to take pictures, and most film companies sent crews to the Iberian peninsula. During the first weeks of the conflict the government was too busy preparing counterattacks to care about propaganda. The only organization able to film and distribute movies was the Anarchist Federation, which emphasized popular participation and voluntary enlistment of the masses. Very soon the Soviet Union, which backed the Madrid government, sent two of its best filmmakers to Spain. Traveling across the country and working close to the front lines between August 1936 and July 1937, they shot more than 18,000 meters (about 60,000 feet) of film. The Soviet cameramen introduced a cinematic style that was more factual than the Anarchist approach. They helped the Madrid government produce its own documentaries and newsreels. Franco’s rebels, on the other hand, were on their guard against reporters who, in their view, would only circulate biased information. Cameramen and journalists were forbidden to communicate news other than that supplied by headquarters. There was thus little that could be filmed: parades, troops in the streets, and, in the Navarra region, the enthusiastic enlistment of volunteers amid much religious display. The Italians sent by Mussolini to fight on Franco’s side opened an information office, which took and diffused powerful pictures. Under the Italian influence, Franco’s rebels set up a propaganda section whose documentaries could compete with the Republican ones.
In the summer of 1936 the world was anxious to hear news from Spain. The first illustrated papers or newsreels left a deep impact on public opinion, “freezing” an image of each camp that remained largely unchanged up to the victory by Franco in March 1939. In order to illustrate the liberation of the Spanish proletariat, the Anarchists took pictures of mobs destroying religious symbols, of armed women urging men to fight, and of volunteers rushing to the front. These pictures established an image of the Republican side as full of enthusiasm but uncoordinated and anti-Catholic. Conversely, pictures taken in Franco’s camp stressed order and respect for the church. Drawing on these images, many contemporary accounts of the war reduced the conflict to the symbolic words “order” and “anarchy.”
After Franco failed to take Madrid, it became plain that the conflict would last much longer. Unable to maintain a permanent crew in Spain, most newsreel companies often purchased their material from the Soviets, whose prices were attractive. Cut and reed-ited, this raw material frequently lost its original meaning. The Francoists were especially good at recycling pictures taken by the Re-publicans—for example, using shots of Madrid bombed by the Italians as if they had been taken in a city bombed by the Republicans. Today no film of the war can be taken at face value. In their broader propaganda both sides insisted on their military might and the certainty of their victory. The dominant theme in Republican propaganda was the martyrdom of a population deprived of freedom, humiliated, and forced into exile. In nationalist propaganda the aim was general reconciliation in an attempt to reconstruct eternal Spain. Paradoxically, both sides rarely set out their political program. The Republicans made little reference to social reforms and were extremely careful not to criticize those Spaniards who had aligned with the nationalists or to defame the Catholic Church. The nationalists attacked the “Communists and atheists” who led the republic but took care to distinguish between the population and their leaders.
However different the two camps may have been, their messages were characterized by extreme simplicity. Neither side left room for political debate. Their infinitely repeated images in print and news documentary left a profound impression on those who received them, but the impact was not necessarily what their authors intended. In Britain images of the air bombing of towns like Guernica were read as a testament to the power of the bomber and an argument against war rather than a justification for aid to the Spanish republic. In the longer term the Spanish conflict resulted in previously unknown forms of ideological communication, the radicalized confrontation between two visions of the world giving rise to a new language of propaganda. The level of propaganda foreshadowed that of World War II, but the visual and verbal language of the Spanish Civil War anticipated the beginning of the Cold War, where the ideological conflict again pitted the Reds against the imperialist powers.
