When the recent motion of censure has already fallen into oblivion, I am still curious about what Ramón Tamames thought in his years of communist militancy. I only have three of the many books by him. First it was Estructura económica de España (1970), which I bought at the time and which I have not read beyond its first pages, due to my habitual laziness in tackling an economics text. The last one, a gift from a friend, has been La mitad del mundo que fue de España. A true story, almost unbelievable (2021), which I have on the waiting list. And in between, in November 1973, I read The Republic. The era of Franco (1973), which, edited by Alfaguara, is volume VII of his history of Spain, in which there are valuable contributions by Domínguez Ortiz, Anes, Artola and Martínez Cuadrado.
Tamames presents it as "an essay of historical synthesis, without any erudite claim, and without his own direct investigations except in very few cases". Compared to the works of those historians, it seems to be more a book made in haste, by accumulation of other people's materials, than the result of personal labor. And it is, without a doubt, a text compiled from a leftist, progressive or anti-Franco perspective, but it is not sectarian.
It is not sectarian because already on its first page it writes: "Many times it has been said that the Republic was brought by the monarchists and the republicans lost it"; because "the monarchists, by accepting the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera outside the Constitution of 1876, signed, with a more or less long but certain expiration, the death certificate of the monarchy itself"; and because "the attempt to build a democratic republic, an objective that was established on the basis of a republican-socialist alliance (...), led to the electoral collapse (in 1933) of a government fought in parliament from the right, as it were of him by the extremist left”.
And he baptizes the subsequent dictatorship as "Franco's era", because "there has not been a time in all of our history that has been so indelibly marked by an individual political figure (...) without giving this expression either a hagiographic or pejorative meaning. ”, taking into account that, “General Franco knew how to configure the political regime that he considered most convenient; although always among the coordinates that served in traditional Spain to set the limits of the power of a head of state: army, Church and economic power”. Concluding that "it will be necessary to ask ourselves at the end of this era" (remember that he wrote in 1973, two years before Franco's death) if "it has been possible for the country to have an open and hopeful future or if, on the contrary, they are looming in the horizon the black clouds of unresolved problems, such as education and socioeconomic imbalances.
Tamames presents the eve of the Civil War with three appointments. One by Indalecio Prieto, who warned in Cuenca about the ineffectiveness of violence and street fights, which did nothing but prepare the field for the advent of a military dictatorship in which –advance the name!– “General Franco was the protagonist more plausible”.
Another from Dr. Marañón, in El Sol on June 2, predicting that a few months of “severe friction, sometimes violent” were approaching. And the last one by Miguel Maura, in El Sol on June 18, who warned about the progressive political polarization. All this without forgetting –adds Tamames– the “role corresponding to the decision of the enemies of the Republic, who did not think of anything other than overthrowing it through a more extensive and better organized conspiracy than that of Sanjurjo in 1932” .
In short: Tamames has not been and is not a sectarian. He has plenty of talent and egotism for it. It is not surprising that he closes his book on the Republic and the Franco era with a few words taken from Canon González Ruiz, famous in his day, referring to "this old Spanish society that, from Recaredo to the present day, has been radically marked by a clericalism comparable only to its opposite twin, anti-clericalism”.
