Picasso, Gernika, and Mariupol: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Death of Francisco Franco
On November 18 of this year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Spain to discuss more military aid for Ukraine in its fight to fend off the Russian aggressor and remain an independent, democratically governed people. He and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid to view Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, “Guernica”. Zelenskyy noted how the work portrays so well the horrors of war, especially the bombing of civilians, such as that which Russia is currently inflicting on the cities of Ukraine. It was not the first time Zelenskyy had made the connexion. In April of 2022, on a video call with Sánchez, he noted the relevance of the famous painting for Ukrainians. The months of both of those times Zelenskyy connected with Spanish authorities and referred to this painting—April and November—are symbolic for Spain and Europe in general.
It was on April 26, 1937, that the world crossed a threshold in the science of war. At the request of Francisco Franco, the leader of Spain’s nationalists, German and Italian warplanes bombed the small city of Guernica (Basque: Gernika). Over the course of three hours in the late afternoon, for the first time in history, war planes directly attacked a city full of civilians, bombing the urban core to rubble. It was a harbinger of things to come.
The reason for the attack was allegedly because Gernika, the ancient capital of the Basque province of Vizcaya (Basque: Bizkaia), was being used as a communications hub for Republican forces. Strategically, the attack was unnecessary. All the Basque provinces except Bizkaia were already occupied by Franco, with the rest of the Republican pocket along the north coast of Spain holding out only in Cantabria and the eastern half of Asturias. By August, the pocket was fully controlled by Franco. The practical effects of the aerial bombing were only to terrorise the city’s population and give the German and Italian pilots practice for their own countries’ future endeavours of conquest.
The event sent shockwaves across the world. Photographs of Gernika’s centre bombed to rubble and accounts from the survivors inspired Pablo Picasso to paint the now famous image he titled simply with the city’s name. This large, cubist painting gives expression to the terror, fear, and confusion unleashed on the people of Gernika by this new kind of warfare.
On November 20, 1975—50 years ago—Francisco Franco, the Caudillo, the dictator of Spain for the previous 39 years, died. For most Basques, it was a day of both joy and trepidation. There was no knowing what the designated heir, the crown prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, would do. Franco had come to power and clung to power with the support of conservative Catholics, nationalists, and anti-communists. Had it only been about upholding traditional values and keeping communism at bay, most Basques would have found his program acceptable. In the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, the dominant Basque political party was the Partido Nacionalista Vasca (the Basque Nationalist Party or PNV for short). Its definition of Basqueness rested on three pillars: Basque ancestry, Basque language, and Roman Catholicism. In a way, Franco and the PNV could have been natural allies.
However, Franco’s nationalism was of a particular type. When he said, “Spanish Nationalism”, he meant a uniform Spanish identity characterized by the Castilian language (what the world beyond Spain calls, “Spanish”) and the quashing of regional languages and identities. For the Basques, any sense of conservative Catholic affinity with the new dictator was nullified by his war on the Basque language. His regime prohibited its use in the public sphere (including on the street, even in a private conversation between two people) and barred it from the classroom. His hope was that within a generation or two, the language would die out from neglect. Indeed, his request for the aerial forces provided to him by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to bomb this town of 10,000 probably had as much to do with his disdain for the Basques as with any military strategy—but more on that below.
While the damage he did to Euskara (the Basque word for the language) in his 39 years in power was considerable, bringing it to the brink of becoming unsalvageable, still, Basques were determined to fight. Parents and grandparents organized Ikastolak, clandestine schools to pass the language on to the next generation. Later, beginning in the 1960’s, the terrorist group ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or “Basque Country and Freedom”) harassed the Spanish state with bombings and assassinations. And much as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine inadvertently caused a further enlargement of NATO and the coming together of the Ukrainian people in patriotic fervour—the opposite of what he had expected—so too, Franco’s war on Basque drove many of the once largely conservative Basques into the arms of left-wing ideology to give voice to their aspirations for independence from Spain (as well as from France).
Franco’s policies vis-à-vis the Basques embodied a further historical irony. Prior to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Basques on both sides of the border had enjoyed, since the Middle Ages, various privileges of local self-government called fueros in Spain, and fors in France. The French Revolution (1789 and years following), seeking to remove all such medieval clutter and to create a modern, unified state, eliminated the fors of the Basques on their side of the Pyrenees. The French Basques fought back but could not stop the power of the new revolutionary (soon to be imperial) state.
On the Spanish side, the fueros came under attack in the decades following the 1814 defeat of Napoleon’s forces in Spain. Spain, bankrupted and destabilized by Napoleon’s war of occupation, fell into a period of internal conflict as conservatives wrangled with reformists in the political sphere and sometimes on the battlefield (Carlist Wars: 1833-1840, 1846-1849, 1872-1876). The Basques sided with the Carlists—the conservatives—wishing to preserve their old fueros of self-government and special economic status. The reformists wanted to create a modern, unified state where such “archaic” (as they saw it) local privileges did not exist. An ancient oak tree that stood in the commons in Gernika, where the representatives of all the towns and villages of Bizkaia used to gather annually to function as the legislature for their province, became a symbol of Basque resistance and a reminder of the privileges originally granted by the crown of Castile, and later affirmed by the crown of united Spain. The monarchs of Castile and then of Spain had come to that tree to take a public, sacred oath to respect and uphold the fueros. The famous 19th century bertsolari (literally, “versifier”) José María Iparraguirre, composed the iconic song known to all in the Basque Country, “Gernikako arbola” (“The Tree of Gernika”). Nevertheless, in the Third Carlist War, the reformists won. But the symbol of the tree lived on, as did the aspiration for self-government—but not, it must be clarified, for independence. Here too, Franco’s oppression supercharged Basque aspirations from mere autonomy within Spain to full separation from Spain.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is sometimes viewed as a fourth Carlist War. However, while Franco gladly absorbed the old school Carlists (Conservative Catholic monarchists) into his movement, he had his own ideas of nationalism. He embraced conservative Catholicism with vigour, but he rejected both the call to re-establish a traditional monarchy and the local fueros. Like the earlier reformists, Franco envisioned a unified state. Unlike the reformists, his chosen model for governance was that of his ally Benito Mussolini: a fascist state that leaned on the army, the police, the business elite, and the church for support (NB: Mussolini maintained the monarchy in Italy, but by 1937, his relationship with the church had soured somewhat from its halcyon days in 1929 and the Lateran Treaty that established the Vatican City as an independent state and gave financial compensation to the Holy See for the loss of the Papal States in 1870). Indeed, Franco leaned so much on the church, that he handed all of Spain’s social institutions such as schools and hospitals over to it.
While the situation of modern Ukraine is very different from that of the 1930’s Basque Country, there are some notable parallels that create a further resonance with Picasso’s image of the fascist and nationalist terror unleashed on Gernika. Today, a man who purports to uphold traditional values and the central role of the church in society rules with an iron fist in the Kremlin. He has great disdain for not only the idea of a Ukrainian state, but the very existence of Ukrainian language, culture, and history. We see in the occupied territories a much more violent version of Franco’s anti-Basque policies. Not only are children barred from using Ukrainian in school, but defiance of the Russification effort can lead to the seizure of the children from their parents to have them adopted out to families in Russia. The wholesale destruction of Ukrainian cities is not limited to one. Wherever the Russian army advances, towns and villages are levelled as part of a scorched earth approach to warfare. The levels of arrest and torture in the occupied territories make the Franco crack down at the end of the Spanish Civil War seem almost civilised in its restraint.
Among the many cities destroyed by Russian shelling and bombing, perhaps the closest to taking on the iconic status of Gernika is Mariupol. There, in 2022, as the Russian army approached, parents and teachers took the children to the historic theatre (perhaps the Russians would have some regard for a facility that largely staged Russian plays?), writing in large block letters on the pavement outside the word for “CHILDREN” (surely the Russians were not so cruel as to intentionally kill children). Both assumptions were wrong. The targeted destruction of this building demonstrated that there really are no limits to the cruelty and utter disregard for standards of humanity —or for that matter, of Christian mercy—for the Russian war machine. The heroic fight of Mariupol’s defenders, even after they were surrounded, to keep the invaders occupied and allow others to respond elsewhere, has become one of the great symbols of Ukrainian determination. The cynical Russian efforts to clear and rebuild parts of Mariupol for Russian settlers while disadvantaging the remaining locals at every turn demonstrates the plan: erasing Ukraine from the map.
Mariupol in 2022 in the aftermath of Russia's occupation of the city
World War II elevated Picasso’s “Guernica” to a symbol far beyond what happened to its namesake city, or even in the broader Spanish Civil War. The world had witnessed unparalleled destruction and death. In the aftermath of that global war, the painting toured the world to large crowds—but it did not go to Spain. Picasso insisted that he would not allow his work to go to Spain until such time as a democratic republic had been re-established. Nevertheless, the Franco regime began making overtures for acquiring it in 1968, perhaps because of the painting’s fame, to demonstrate to the world that Spain was not as bad as some said. Picasso died in 1973; Franco in 1975. Spain adopted its current constitution in 1978—not the republic Picasso wanted, but a democratic constitutional monarchy none the less. In 1981, the painting went to Spain, and in 1992 was moved to its current home in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Meanwhile, back in the Basque Country, Picasso’s “Guernica” had become a symbol of Basque nationalism, elements from the painting sometimes being used as design features on their materials. Basques, and especially residents of Gernika, rightfully felt that the painting’s home should be there, in the city that inspired its creation. Today, not far from the sacred oath tree of Gernika, a tile mural recreation of the painting calls for this to happen.
The tile mural in Gernika calling for the original "Guenica" to be brought there. "Gernikara" means, "to Gernika".
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