Guerra y revolucion en Espana, 1936-1939 by Dolores IbarruriReview by: Gabriel JacksonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Jun., 1973), pp. 702-703Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1847722 .

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70a Reviews of Books

Jacques Soustelle, Gabriel Esquier, Jean Chr6tien, Alain Darlan, and others that illu- mine this diplomatic tangle. The positive con- tributions more than offset the shortcomings.

LEON B. BLAIR

University of Plano

IRIS M. ZAVALA. Masones, comuneros y carbo- narios. (Historia y arqueologia.) [Madrid:] Siglo Veintiuno de Espafia Editores. 1971. Pp. 363.

The political activities of Spanish secret socie- ties have been the inspiration for a good deal of impassioned polemics, and an up-to-date and impartial account has long been needed. Pro- fessor Zavala proposes to examine these socie- ties between i8oo and 1850 in order to discover their impact on Spanish political parties and their possible connection with other conspira- torial groups. Moreover, following Lefebvre or Rud6, she seeks to discover through the secret societies the role of the people in the political turmoil of those years.

About half the book is devoted to the au- thor's text; the balance is a long appendix of documents. The approach is basically narrative and pivots on the shifts in the political regime between i8oo and i85o. The core of source ma- terial is drawn from Inquisition papers and the secret archives of Ferdinand VII, but biogra- phies, memoirs, and numerous other sources are used as well.

Zavala finds the focus of the Spanish Revolu- tion shifting progressively to the left. Commenc- ing with the elitist liberal groups centering around Masonic lodges, by 1823 the movement had come to have republican elements and to reflect the grievances and ambitions of at least certain sectors of the people. Twenty years later the revolution had begun to draw suste- nance from the new class of industrial workers. The author sees the conspirators as playing a vital part in establishing democratic political parties and sentiment in Spain. Moreover, she succeeds in establishing a strong presumptive case for the connections between Spanish and European revolutionaries. In this, as in other instances, the Pyrenees were not quite so high as we have sometimes thought.

Zavala succeeds in carrying through her in- tent. In addition she gets us at least partly in-

side that peculiar revolutionary world of ambi- tion, enthusiasm, and betrayal and gives us an insight into the personalities and ideas of lib- eral Spain as they emerged from conspiracy into open activity. However, I do not think that she quite succeeds in "going to the peo- ple." The nonliterary, nonpolitical conspirator remains shadowy. He is there, but his role, his motivations, and his impact are blurred.

In any case, this clarification of the influence of the secret societies and their political role is well done, and the author is to be congratu- lated on a worthwhile book.

GEORGE M. ADDY

Brigham Young University

DOLORES IBARRURI et al., editors. Guerra y revo- lucion en Espaiia, 1936-I939. Volume 3. Mos- cow: Editorial Progreso. 1971. Pp. 277.

The present volume of the Spanish Communist party history of the Civil War covers the pe- riod roughly from the fall of Malaga through the failure of the offensive against Belchite (February-October, 1937). The most impor- tant events dealt with are the war in the Basque provinces, the Battle of Brunete, the problem of Mediterranean "piracy," and the internal struggles with the Caballero Socialists and the anarchists. This is "official" history, and its value for scholars can perhaps best be illustrated by reviewing the coverage of a sin- gle famous occurrence: the political crisis in Barcelona during the first week of May. The outline of events-attempted government occu- pation of the telephone building on May 2, barricades and street fighting until May 5, di- vided counsels among the CNT and POUM forces, and an estimated five hundred killed and one thousand wounded as the balance for three days of fighting-reads in this version much as it does in the accounts of non-Com- munist historians. However, the FAI and the POUM are alleged to have been "better armed" than the government forces and to have paralyzed the city through a "perfectly or- chestrated" plot to assault all government offices, and Ambassador Faupel's memorandum reporting that Franco claimed that his agents in Barcelona had caused the street fighting is taken as incontrovertible evidence that the

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Modern Europe 703

"putschists" were in league with the "fascist" enemy. The account mentions that the anarch- ist ministers Federica Montseny and Garcia Oliver came to Barcelona, but it does not credit them with a major role in calming spir- its and limiting the bloodshed. There is indig- nant reference to the assassinated UGT officials but no mention of the several anarchists assas- sinated. Largo Caballero is held responsible for the crisis, but more in sorrow than in anger. There are copious, and familiar, quotations from the contemporary press and from pub- lished memoirs. Thus three decades after the events the Communists stick very closely to their 1937 version but are less polemical in their treatment of non-Communist leaders such as Largo Caballero, Azafia, and Luis Compa- nys. Scattered throughout the text are quota- tions from Communist party archives, but these do not contribute important new facts to our knowledge. The volume will be most use- ful to students of party history, of the internal political struggles of the Left, and of the poign- ant half-truths of bourgeois-proletarian cooper- ation in 1937.

GABRIEL JACKSON

University of California, San Diego

HORST LADEMACHER. Die belgische Neutralitat als Problem der europAischen Politik, 1830- I9I4. Bonn: Ludwig Rohrscheid Verlag. 1971. Pp. 536. DM 68.

DAVID OWEN KIEFT. Belgium's Return to Neutral- ity: An Essay in the Frustrations of Small Power Diplomacy. New York: Oxford University Press. 1972. Pp. Xii, 201. $13.75.

No individual small nation-state in the modern period has been more significant and critical in the international politics of Europe than has tiny Belgium. The specific means that allowed Belgium to remain an independent and sover- eign state was the nonaligned status called neu- trality. We now have two major achievements on the theory and practice of that delicate and intricate statecraft. This long-isolated and neg- lected area is now illuminated by the lengthy, detailed, and valuable Lademacher monograph and the short yet precise and interesting Kieft account. While each deals with Belgian foreign

policy, the former stresses the broader, fuller European context of the nineteenth-century great powers system while the latter dwells more exclusively on domestic factors as the vital determinants in the interwar diplomacy of Brussels. These are studies for specialists, whether the interest is in Belgium, neutrality, alliance systems, the sources of international conflict, and so on.

The fresh, comprehensive, very German view of Lademacher covers the years of the "real" neutrality from its inception at London be- tween 1830 and 1839 down to its violation in 1914. The thoroughness of the research is un- equaled among the similar accounts previously published. In the same manner as the multivol- ume Bonjour treatment of the Swiss case this rich study contributes a wealth of detail, bal- anced judgments, and a sound understanding of the historical forces. While the basic find- ings will not startle any well-informed student or ignite any far-ranging controversy, the im- mense industry of Lademacher results in a most welcome complete review and assessment of those eighty-odd years. The author declares and documents fully the initial success of per- petual neutrality as a "concensus status" cho- sen and guaranteed by the major powers func- tioning in a relative equilibrium. In what amounts to a historical version of systems anal- ysis, Lademacher depicts this early phase juxta- posed to the later century with its decline in the viability of neutrality. This he attributes to the waning of the natural self-righting balance (as exercised by Great Britain) and to the disin- tegration of the almost institutionalized confer- ence system. Thus the fifties and sixties are a primary concern and receive as much emphasis as the later years with the clear-cut power-bloc system attached to quasi-permanent military and friendship alliances. Lademacher demon- strates how the documents spell out the Belgian (and British) ability to cope deftly with the required rights and duties of nonbellig- erents in war and of noncommitted or nona- ligned in peace. It is in the exact substance he gives to generally known hypotheses that the author catches the historian's attention. For example, he does not merely assert but pro- duces diverse sources illustrating why the rela- tively equal major states accepted the neutrali-

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