“Ashes and Granite documents
a little-understood side of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath:
what the war and the installation of Francoism meant to the
making of cities. Through the presentation of hitherto-buried
primary sources and excellent comparative visual documentation,
the book is a genuine contribution to urban history.”
Richard Sennett, School Professor of Sociology, emeritus, The
London School of Economics “Interdisciplinary
studies are still relatively uncommon in Spanish historical
writing and Ashes and Granite is much to be welcomed. The
relationship between official discourse and the practice of
urban reconstruction in Francoist Spain that emerges from
the book is arresting, and offers nuanced and innovative insights
into the nature of the regime.” Mary Vincent Professor
of Modern European History, University of Sheffield
“This highly original
book joins a growing subfield of scholarship on the urban
aftermath of wartime bombings. While other works have highlighted
memory or commemoration,[1] Olivia Muñoz-Rojas (Univ. of Westminster)
draws on her knowledge of architecture, urban studies, and
Spanish history to assess the Franco dictatorship's attempts
to wed reconstruction to ideology at sites in three cities
affected by Spain’s Civil War (1936–39): the Montaña
de Príncipe Pío in Madrid, eight bridges in Bilbao, and the
Plaça Nova in Barcelona.
Chapter 1 describes the author's urban approach, then chapter
2 gives a terse and evenhanded overview of the Civil War itself.[2]
The heart of the book, chapters 3–5, on Madrid, Bilbao, and
Barcelona, evince an impressive control of archival materials
in Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Catalan. A sixth and final
chapter, “History, Discourse and the Built Environment,”
recaps the main arguments.
… Francisco Franco’s dictatorship rested upon
conciliating several right-wing political factions, all of
which had qualms about the Republic. The Falange—the only
ideologically fascist faction—Franco entrusted with managing
the symbolic aspects of reconstruction, given his emphasis
on unity, discipline, honor, and hierarchy. After all, "The
Falange’s preference for sober, classical monumentalism,
specifically seventeenth-century Spanish architecture, is
most visible in the largely unaccomplished project for Imperial
Madrid” (34). Moreover, the dictator's initial
high expectations for Nazi Germany's eventual victory informed
his approach to reconstruction. By 1943, he was forced to
reconsider his architectural influences and turned to Carlist
and church ideals.
… Significantly, Franco considered cities to be decadent
(pro-Republic, liberal, anti-clerical, anti-militaristic)
and preferred agrarian Spain as better suited to the renascence
he envisioned (rural, religious, traditional in architecture
as well as outlook). As the nation’s capital, Madrid
fared somewhat better in this regard than Bilbao or Barcelona.
The Falange published considerably on the question of what
defines Spanish architecture and found historical inspiration
in Juan de Herrera, the sixteenth-century architect of El
Escorial, whose design was highly valued for its ideological
connections to Rome via the Renaissance and to German purity
through the ruling Bourbon house. Franco wanted to revive
the aura of Spain at its imperial height. But in the end,
especially in the case of Bilbao’s bridges, he favored
the rationalist style that had emerged in Fascist Italy.
… In all three cases under consideration, the regime’s
reconstruction plans gave way to the private, local, often
piecemeal planning so typical across Europe after World War
II, with results far removed from their ideological beginnings.
The voice of the Falange was muted as other stakeholders weighed
in. To be sure, the regime consistently whitewashed its own
part in the wartime destruction of cities, blaming instead
the Republic, which it always cast as communist and aggressive.
… The chapter on Madrid is bookended by a fascinating
interpretation of Goya’s El tres de mayo de 1808
en Madrid. Muñoz-Rojas’s focus here is the former
Falange headquarters, site of the failed July 1936 coup that
erupted into civil war. The space now holds the Temple of
Debod, a pharaonic monument given by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel
Nasser to recognize Spain's help in the UNESCO-organized campaign
to Nubia in 1960, when the Aswan dam threatened to inundate
a number of architectural treasures. The story of how a memorial
to the coup gave way to ancient Egyptian artifacts is set
within a larger discussion of the building of greenways through
the capital to circumvent the slums surrounding the historical
entrance to the city center. The city’s three main axes—the
Vía de la Victoria, Vía de Europe, and Vía del Emperio—were
rebuilt (and named) to represent the route to Franco’s
victory, its connection to Europe, and its historic Portuguese,
African, and Latin American connections. The placement of
various official buildings throughout Madrid rounded out the
plan. Despite this construction of an apparent legacy, "the
Franco regime was as successful in abandoning the Falange’s
dreams of a grandiose, imperial post-war Madrid as it was
in burying the uncomfortable memory of the Falangists’
early defeat—and by default the memory of the fierce resistance
of the Republicans who remained in the capital city and fought
against the Liberation Crusade for three years" (80).
The second Goya bookend follows:
… The dramatic clash between rebel mutineers and popular
militias that took place on the Montaña de Príncipe Pío on
the dawn of 19 July 1936 oddly conjures the events of 2 May
1808. It is not a coincidence. Among Spanish historians and
intellectuals, the understanding of the trauma of the 1936
military uprising and the ensuing civil war has in some ways
been rooted in the interpretation of the trauma of the Spanish
War of Independence. The apparent dilemma between a culturally
self-sufficient Spain and a culturally modern Spain, between
a genuine and a foreign Spain, emerges forcefully in the War
of Independence and haunts Spanish society over the course
of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth….
[T]he 1936 military uprising seemed to set in motion the kind
of fierce, revolutionary sentiments that animated the Spanish
guerrilla in 1808 in their [sic] fight against the French
invader. (80)
Turning to Bilbao, Muñoz-Rojas recounts how the retreating
Basque Republicans destroyed their own bridges in hopes of
slowing down the advancing rebel army. Franco held up the
destruction as emblematic of "red-separatist barbarism"
and made immediate reconstruction of the bridges his top priority.
Six of the resulting structures—built by the American firm
Babcock & Wilcox under a prewar agreement—replaced the
original architecture with rationalist designs named after
Franco and his officers (General Sanjurjo, Colonel Ortiz de
Zárate, and General Mola) as well as one saint (San Antón)
and the victory itself (La Victoria). The San Antón was the
closest to its original design, but its buttresses are now
adorned with the fascist eagle and yoke along with Roman Catholic
iconography. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Franco
regime's bombastic, self-congratulatory memorializing at the
opening ceremonies for the new bridges (before their full
completion); one “subversive” note was sounded
by an architect with Republican sympathies who had not been
purged due to his professional expertise, in short supply
at the time.
… Barcelona’s Plaça Nova, the present-day open
space in front of the city’s medieval Cathedral, was
made possible by wartime destruction. Muñoz-Rojas explains
how the exigencies of total war, Italy's long-term bombing
strategy, and Franco's rearguard urban bombing policy devastated
both the physical Barcelona and its citizens’ psyches.
In the aftermath, exposure of the city’s Cathedral served
the regime’s purposes. The surrounding neighborhood,
the Barri Gotic, had been the city’s center in the Middle
Ages, a period the regime sought to downplay because of its
association with Jews. It was also the era of the independent
Catalan state under the King of Aragon. The regime much preferred
to evoke ancient Roman history. By chance, the Italian bombardment
during the Civil War had begun the process of clearing the
buildings to reveal the walls of the Roman-era fortifications
of Barcino. Plans to open up this space had existed since
the mid-nineteenth century, when the city's medieval walls
had been completely removed (they are detectable today only
in the course of major avenues).
… The reconstruction or “disencumbering”
of the Cathedral as the regime stated it, was financed by
the Bank of Spain, which opened a new branch nearby. When
the six-hundredth anniversary of the plaza was observed in
1955, Catalans used the occasion to celebrate their history
and (officially banned) language. The regime permitted this
subversion in the name of regional diversity. The final piece
in the plaza’s reconstruction is Joaquin Busquet’s
1961 building across from the Cathedral. It is adorned with
Catalan friezes depicting not only the native Catalan dance
(sardana) but also the banned regional flag (senyera).
… As she does for the other two urban metonyms, Muñoz-Rojas
elucidates the practical considerations that thwarted earlier
falangist ideological aspirations: “The problem was
that it was difficult to ground modern economic growth on
agricultural production in a country that had undergone few
changes to its predominantly quasi-feudal system of landownership.
And the conservative landowners who had supported Franco in
his Liberation Crusade were unwilling to give up their age-old
privileges. Without economic growth from which to extract
public funds, notwithstanding the exaction of resources from
the vanquished, few of the other principles could translate
into practical results” (166). The handling of these
historical intricacies is most impressive, but, as the author
herself hints, more work remains to be done on this subject.
… The book is rich not only in scholarly documentation,
but in supporting graphics, including seventy-three historic
and contemporary photographs and maps (and an illustration
of the Goya painting), not to mention cover art.[3]
… Muñoz-Rojas has produced an innovative and perceptive
investigation of prewar planning, wartime architectural casualties,
postwar reconstruction, and the contours of dictatorship in
modern Spain. Her book is a valuable addition to an emerging
historiography on the aftermath of war from the viewpoints
of urban reconstruction and the ideological aesthetics of
dictatorships.”
[1] E.g., Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural
Heritage and Memory after Civil War (Portland: Sussex
Acad Press, 2011) and Stefan Goebel and Derek Keene, eds.,
Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences
and Commemorations of Total War (Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Press, 2011).
[2] Given her focus on urban destruction caused by air raids,
Muñoz-Rojas relies heavily on Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and
Joan Villarroya, España en llamas: la Guerra Civil desde
el aire (Madrid: Ed. Temas de Hoy, 2003).
[3] Especially valuable are juxtapositions of older and more
recent images to clarify historical changes. And, in one case,
an earlier photograph of the shrine of San Roque in one of
the Plaça Nova’s Roman towers is particularly helpful,
since the statue is now encased in protective plastic. Given
the large number of graphics in the book, it is understandable,
if regrettable, that close-ups of, e.g., the San Antón bridge
buttresses had to be forgone. Only one graphic (figure 4.15,
of the Victoria bridge, a “harmonious view of the embankment”)
is seriously impaired by low-quality reproduction.
Review by Eric R. Smith, Illinois Mathematics and Science
Academy, Michigan War Studies Review
|
.jpg)
