When the recent motion of censure has already fallen into oblivion, I am still curious about what Ramón Tamames thought during his years of communist militancy. I only have three of his many books. First was Estructura económica de España (1970), which I bought at the time and which I have not read beyond the first few pages, due to my usual laziness to undertake an economics text. The last one, a gift from a friend, was La mitad del mundo que fue de España. Una historia verdadera, casi increíble (2021), which I have on the waiting list. And in the middle, in November 1973, I read La República. The era of Franco (1973), which, edited by Alfaguara, is volume VII of his history of Spain, in which there are valuable contributions from Domínguez Ortiz, Anes, Artola and Martínez Cuadrado. Tamames presents it as "an essay of historical synthesis, without any scholarly pretensions, and without direct research of its own except for very few cases".
Next to the works of these historians, it seems more like a book made in haste, due to the accumulation of extraneous materials, than the result of a personal task. And it is, without a doubt, a text compiled from a leftist, progressive or anti-Francoist perspective, but it is not sectarian.
It is not sectarian because already on the first page he writes: "Many times it has been said that the Republic was brought by the monarchists and lost by the republicans"; because "when the monarchists accepted the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera on the sidelines of the Constitution of 1876, they signed, with a more or less long but certain expiration date, the death certificate of the monarchy itself"; and because "the attempt to build a democratic republic, an objective that was raised on the basis of a republican-socialist alliance (...), led to the electoral overthrow (in 1933) of a government fought in Parliament from the right, as outside it by the extremist left".
And he calls the subsequent dictatorship "Franco's era" because "there has not been an era in our entire history that has been so indelibly marked by an individual political figure (...) without giving this expression even a meaning hagiographic or pejorative", taking into account that, "General Franco knew how to configure the political regime that he thought was most convenient; although always between 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, "we will have to ask ourselves at the end of this era" (we 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 the black clouds of unresolved problems hover on the horizon, such as education and socio-economic imbalances".
Tamames draws the eve of the Civil War with three quotations. One by Indalecio Prieto, who warned Conca about the ineffectiveness of violence and street fights, which did nothing but prepare the ground for the advent of a military dictatorship in which - the name advanced! - "the general Franco was the most likely protagonist".
Another by 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, which warned about progressive political polarization. All this without forgetting - adds Tamames - the "paper corresponding to the decision of the enemies of the Republic, who were thinking of nothing else but to overthrow it through a conspiracy more extensive and better organized than that of Sanjurjo del 1932".
In short: Tamames has not been and is not a sectarian. He has enough talent and egotism for that. It is not surprising that he closes his book on the Republic and the era of Franco with some words he takes from Canon González Ruiz, famous in his day, referring to "this old Spanish society which, from Recaredo to the present day, has been radically marked by a clericalism only comparable to its opposite twin, anti-clericalism".
