The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ the Republic, effectively announcing to the British and French authorities that he considered the war lost and thereby undermining the basis of Negrín’s policy of using the rhetoric of resistance as a negotiating card. Pascua was soon irritated by what he described as Azaña’s carefree routine of ‘la dolce far niente’. It consisted largely of a daily touristic excursion around Paris in an Embassy car accompanied by his inseparable friend and brother-in-law Cipriano Rivas Cherif followed by an evening gathering (tertulia) with his friends in the French capital. Resentful of what they believed to be a betrayal of the Republic, the domestic staff of the Paris Embassy even refused to serve him.33 In fact, Azaña was more concerned with the preservation of the artistic treasures of the Prado than with the impact of his decision to flee. He had said to Álvarez del Vayo: ‘A hundred years from now, few people will know who Franco or I were but everyone will always know who Velázquez and Goya are.’34 He was also concerned to go on collecting his salary.35

      The tensions deriving from Azaña’s presence in Paris were exacerbated by the closeness of his relationship with Cipriano Rivas Cherif. Rivas Cherif was regarded as a frivolous lightweight by Pascua, by Álvarez del Vayo and by Negrín. He had made damaging mistakes as Consul in Geneva and, merely to please Azaña, he had been given the virtually meaningless title of Introductor de Embajadores, effectively head of protocol for the President. However, in Paris, he was Azaña’s liaison with the Quai d’Orsay and behaved as if he was at the service of the French government rather than the Spanish Republic. To the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet he parroted Azaña’s view that the Republic was finished and that the rhetoric of resistance by Negrín and Álvarez del Vayo was merely a device to gain time. His conversations with Bonnet convinced the French that the Spanish government was adrift and in conflict with the exiled head of state who, unlike Negrín and Del Vayo, had the good sense to see that the only answer was an immediate peace settlement.36

      Negrín knew that the war was effectively lost, but he was not prepared simply to walk away. As he told the standing committee of the Cortes on 31 March 1939: ‘The Government, in the first few days after reaching Figueras, after leaving Barcelona, realized that we were facing a real catastrophe, a catastrophe infinitely bigger than the catastrophe that we have suffered with the retreat of the civilian population and the army. It was fully aware that there was very little chance of saving the situation, but the Government knew that it was its duty to look for a way, if there was one.’37 When Negrín said ‘the Government’, he was referring to himself.

      On the morning of Sunday 5 February, Azaña achieved the exile he had longed for. He described the pathetic manner of his entry into France some months later in a letter to his friend Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo. He and his entourage left at dawn in a small convoy of police cars. As a courtesy, Negrín accompanied them across the frontier. The President of the Cortes, Diego Martínez Barrio, travelled ahead in a separate car. This vehicle broke down. Negrín and others in the party tried unsuccessfully to push it out of the way. The party was obliged to cross the hazardously icy border on foot, thereby fulfilling a gloomy prophecy made by Azaña at the beginning of the Civil War. He had said to his wife, Dolores Rivas Cherif: ‘We will end up leaving Spain on foot.’38 When taking his leave, before walking back into Spain, Negrín kissed the hand of Dolores Rivas and said: ‘Until we meet again soon in Madrid.’39

      As Julián Zugazagoitia commented, Negrín and Azaña were incompatible, the one energetic, dynamic and fearless; the other sedentary and timorous. By this stage ‘They felt mutual contempt. At that moment, they hated each other.’ On his return to Spain, Negrín remarked to Zugazagoitia: ‘You have to feel sorry for poor Azaña! He is fearfulness incarnate. His fear gives him a greenish-yellow colour and makes him look like a decomposing corpse.’ As he was approaching the frontier, Negrín encountered Lluís Companys, the Catalan President, José Antonio Aguire, the Basque President, and Manuel Irujo, who had been Minister of Justice in his own government. They had proposed accompanying Azaña into France, but he had refused their offer because to have crossed together would have implied that they were on the same level. They now offered to go back into Spain with Negrín, but he politely declined, allegedly muttering to himself, ‘That’s one less thing to worry about.’40

      The cabinet had been installed in the castle of Figueras on a hill overlooking the town. With a drawbridge, thick outer and inner walls, it seemed impregnable but was an entirely inappropriate location for a government. According to the British Chargé d’Affaires, Ralph Stevenson, it was:

      a large fortress-like barracks on the outskirts of the town. At the best of times, it must have been an uncomfortable place, cold, dank and dirty. But with the débris of the Spanish Government heaped into it pell-mell it was an unforgettable sight. Luckily the weather was bad and there was no great likelihood of aerial bombardment for the place was a veritable death-trap, with only one narrow road, serving for both ingress and egress, along certain stretches of which only one vehicle could pass at a time.41

      When the weather permitted, the town was subject to frequent rebel bombing raids. Around the courtyard, various ministries were installed in rooms with the words ‘foreign ministry’, ‘ministry of the interior’, ‘cabinet office’ and so on roughly chalked on the wall next to the door. The town square, where the office of press and propaganda had been installed in a requisitioned house, was heaving with refugees. There was little by way of furniture and even less food for the staff. In the words of Herbert Matthews, ‘It was a madhouse of bewildered officials and soldiers, struggling desperately, not only with their own work, but with those thousands of swarming refugees who filled every house and doorway and covered almost every inch of the streets where men, women and children slept through the bitterly cold nights with almost no food and certainly no place to go.’42 Negrín worked ceaselessly to try to limit the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the defeat in Catalonia and to keep alive the idea of resistance as the best way to achieve a peace settlement that would prevent a vengeful mass slaughter at the hands of the Francoists. To this end, he maintained ‘the mask of resistance come what may’. With a colossal weight on his shoulders, he tried to conceal his exhaustion and despair from his ministerial colleagues. Zugazagoitia related that ‘one evening, he appeared in the castle, exhausted, almost unable to breathe. He asked if we had anything to eat, sat down at the table and, on the verge of tears, was plunged into a crisis of melancholy.’43

      Negrín spoke to the last meeting of the Republican Cortes held in the stables of the castle at midnight on 1 February. It was so cold that many of the deputies sat in overcoats. According to the correspondent of the London Daily Herald who was present:

      Empty chairs were stacked along the walls. Over 106 failed to answer the toll call: many of them were in France, others were holding the dispirited troops together, others had already fallen into Franco’s hands. Four times during the session the unshaded swaying lights registered the bombardment which was hitting the town. Negrín, immaculate in a brown suit, was so calm he might have been addressing his students in the quiet prewar days of Madrid.

      In his exhaustion, he had to pause frequently to gather breath.44

      In the dark, echoing stone chamber, the proceedings appeared to Zugazagoitia like ‘an intimate religious ceremony celebrated by a persecuted sect’. Negrín was, in many senses, virtually alone, deserted by many, supported by a small group of faithful friends. Yet he assumed the responsibility of fighting on, of doing the best for the Republican population that faced defeat СКАЧАТЬ