It is a suitable episode with which to end this chapter of a lifetime affair. For my generation France remains special. I can sympathize with the French sense of loss at the defeat of the language of Voltaire by the world triumph of the language of Benjamin Franklin. It is not only a linguistic but a cultural transformation, for it marks the end of the minority cultures in which only the elites needed international communication, and it hardly mattered that the idiom in which it took place was not widely spoken on the globe, or even – as in the classical dead languages – that it was not spoken at all. I can understand the retreat of a once hegemonic French culture into an hexagonal ghetto, only slightly mitigated by the popularity of ‘postmodern’ French ideologues among American graduate students, who do not always understand them. It is not that this is what Paris wants, but simply that it cannot get used to a state of affairs in which the rest of the world no longer looks to Paris and follows its lead. It is a hard fate to go from global hegemony to regionalism in two generations. It is hardest of all to discover that for most of the world none of this matters. But it matters for my generation of Europeans, Latin Americans and Middle Easterners. And it should matter to younger generations. The stubborn rearguard action of France in defence of the global role of her language and culture may be doomed, but it is also a necessary defence, by no means predestined to failure, of every language, and national and cultural specificity against the homogenization of an essentially plural humanity by the processes of globalization.
20
From Franco to Berlusconi
I
Aspiring novelists are never short of a subject. When all else fails, there’s family and autobiography. Aspiring professional historians have no built-in guide to what part of the past they want to explore, and therefore in most cases what their reputation will rest on – the Tudors, the English Revolution, seventeenth-century Spain or whatever. Usually they acquire a subject at university, give it a title to get a doctorate (or, in my day, when Oxbridge looked down on such titles, a fellowship dissertation) and in most cases stick to their ‘field’ or ‘period’ thereafter. The war had blocked my own attempts to follow this path. So it happened that my first book as a historian, Primitive Rebels, was in a field I had not previously thought much about, and indeed a field nobody else had thought about at all.1 Essentially, it is a book based on my frequent travels in Spain and Italy in the 1950s, two countries to which my life and the fortunes of my writings have been linked ever since.
Unlike Italy – what antifascist would go there? – Spain, where I began to travel in 1951, had been part of my life for a long time – even before the Spanish Civil War, which made it part of everyone’s life in my generation. In spite of everything, after 1945 it was still a strange country for other Europeans. In the minds of most of us it still belonged to a curious realm where the images of revolution, war and defeat in arid landscapes were superimposed on the images of exoticism – flamenco, castanets, bullfights, Carmen, Don José, Escamillo – and those of a generic ‘Spanishness’ – Don Quixote, honour, pride and silence. My uncle had been there and had got to know people there in his time with Universal Films. The relics of his visits filled odd corners of our house: a banderilla soaked in dry blood, a book on bullfighting, a signed photo of an elderly, military-looking Catalan autonomist leader and the like. After the 1934 insurrection in Asturias, a friend sent him copies of the Spanish illustrated papers, I imagine the monarchist ABC with dramatic pictures. And then, in the summer of 1936, in the first weeks after the generals’ rising, thanks to a curious combination of historical circumstances, for a brief moment I saw it myself.
I was then living in Paris for three months before going up to Cambridge, on a grant from the London County Council to improve my French. One day at the end of July I discovered to my agreeable surprise that I had bought a winning lottery ticket. It did not amount to much – I remember it as 165 Francs or about £2–3. Fortunately the new Popular Front government of France had shortly before introduced one of its rare lasting innovations, les congés payés (holidays with pay) and – thanks to another innovation, an undersecretaryship of sports and leisure – ultra-cheap rail travel to enable the population to enjoy them. I therefore used my lottery winnings to take the train from Orsay station – still half a century away from being turned into a museum of nineteenth-century French art – to the Pyrenees for a fortnight of walking, youth hostelling and camping. Halfway through this superb excursion I was introduced to a more expeditious form of cheap movement by one of those peripatetic young central Europeans who in those days pioneered hitchhiking (‘Tippeln’, ‘Autostop’) on this side of the Atlantic. And so I found myself, carried from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean side of the Pyrenees, in a youth hostel close to the Spanish border near the town of Puigcerda. The occasion was too tempting. I went to the frontier, and was turned back by the young militia man who guarded it. I did not have the right papers. I walked a mile or so to the next crossing, where they let me pass without problems and I spent the day looking round Puigcerda, then for all practical purposes an independent revolutionary commune, dominated by the anarchists, with an admixture of members of POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). (I could see no sign of the communists or the socialists, merged by then into a single party, the PSUC [Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia].) I don’t remember how exactly I communicated with the locals, who were naturally interested in an unannounced, indeed in any, stranger, but this is a corner where Spain and France are very mixed up, and Catalan is in any case as close to one language as to the other. I recall no problems. My most lasting image of this memorable day is of a few trucks parked on the main square. Whenever someone felt like going to the war, he went to the trucks, and whenever one filled up with enough volunteers, I was told, it went off to the front. As I wrote about this experience many years later: