In Europe

though. The left-wing Radical Party in France accumulated many supporters among the small farmers, because they were able to mix classic left-republican ideas with the protection of small landowners. In Italy, the communists and the socialists had a firm grip on the rural workers’ unions: around 1920, a farmers’ war was actually waged in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna between the Fascists and the ‘Red barons’. And in Spain one had the anarchists.
    In 1935 and 1936, a young English violinist in search of the meaning of life wandered through Spain, living from his music as he went.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
is the name of the book Laurie Lee wrote later, and his story is characterised by the same nonchalance as the title. What he describes is fascinating. The Spain Lee crossed in the 1930s was not a different country, it was not even a different world, it was a different era. He describes the makeshift farmers’ huts in the mountains, the houses that contained no more than was necessary for a simple life: work and the animals during the day, food and stories in the evening. ‘So it was with us in this nameless village; night found us wrapped in this glowing barn, family and stranger gathered round the long bare table to a smell of woodsmoke, food, and animals.’
    In the Sierra Morena he arrived, after walking for three hours ‘up a rope-ladder of goat tracks’, in a high, chilly ‘huddle of rough-stone hovels, primitively rounded and tufted with dripping moss’. For a bottle of wine and a piece of hardened cheese he played his violin. ‘I felt I could have been with some lost tribal remnant of seventeenth-century Scotland, during one of their pauses between famine and massacre – the children standing barefooted in puddles of dew, old women wrapped in their rancid sheepskins, and the short shaggy men whose squinting faces seemed stuck between a smile and a snarl.’
    Spain was, in some ways, an extra-European territory. Anyone crossing the Pyrenees arrived in a country that had gone its own way, and that had skipped a number of major European developments. Karl Marx once called Spain ‘that least understood of European countries’. Everything there was earlier, or later, or more extreme: the Moorish invasion in the Middle Ages, feudal relations that came too late and had to beimposed with the use of great force, a church that repressed the Enlightenment and intellectual progress, a powerful group of large landowners who blocked all economic modernisation, the eternal hatred between the regions and the central seat of power, the liberals and the traditional Carlists, the farmers and the enormous dead weight of nobility, church and army and the country's obsession with remaining a world empire, even though it had long lain crippled beneath the weight of that ambition.
    ‘One half of Spain eats but does not work, the other half works but does not eat.’ This centuries-old saying accords well with the facts: according to a 1788 census, almost fifty per cent of the male population was not involved in any form of productive labour, and the nineteenth century did little to change that. The country had once been one of Europe's major producers of grain; now the forests had been razed, the arable land depleted. As late as 1930, a third to a half of the population could not read or write. Fifty per cent of the land was owned by less than one per cent of the population. Between 1814–74 thirty-seven coups were attempted, twelve of them successful. By the early years of the twentieth century, Spain was almost bankrupt: the army had one general for every hundred soldiers, and a half of all the country's farmers lived on the brink of starvation. During strikes in Barcelona between 1918–20, the employers and the police hired
pistoleros
to kill union leaders. The unions fought back in kind with their own snipers. Police Commissioner Miguel Arleguí finally put an end to the uprising within two days by gunning down twenty-one union leaders, at home or on the street.
    The Spanish Civil War was not the first, but the fourth civil war within a century. The country had been fighting itself for more than 150 years, in a continual back-and-forth between absolute monarchists and free citizens, between bedrock conservatives and communists, between changing nothing and changing everything.
    In this polarised world, in which all of the participants in the Spanish drama of 1936–9 grew up, anarchism played a