Keywords

4.1 Introduction

Although the subject of the existence and the role of the Spanish tourism institutions during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist period has already been outlined, our interest here lies in the ideas that link the key material, consisting of travel brochures, guides and travel writings, and the manner in which they spread a specific image of the country. The role of this type of literature in the construction of a national historical narrative, written from within or from the outside should be emphasized. We also suggest doing so by comparing the full range of publications in the period comprising the civil war and the first Francoist period until 1959, on both sides of the Pyrenees. This genre is not limited to providing lists of monuments to visit and itineraries to follow: it often includes a few pages dedicated to the history of the place in a section usually placed in the preamble, entitled “History” or sometimes, with a certain amount of modesty, “Historical outline”, “Historical overview”, “A little History”, “History in a few dates”. The responsibility of the guides, whose scarce lines could account for the only source of historical-political knowledge for tourists before, during or after their trip, should be emphasized. The fact that the reader grants considerable credibility to these types of publications is due to some data and techniques that encourage them to consider these summaries as devoid of any subjectivity: the authorship, the publisher, as well as the tone can give importance and value to the content of the historical compendium. Overall, the autoritas of the guide, the highest and unchallenged figure of authority, is extended to sections where their degree of knowledge is much more doubtful.

The corpus under study brings to light the various ways of telling history. There are books that tend to prefer the “little history” of Théodore Gosselin a.k.a. G. Lenôtre, creator, according to Bernard Lerivray, of a history manufactured from anecdotes and sensational subject matters: “History seen through small facts, anecdotes, sharp events, the sensational” (Lerivray 1975, p. 100Footnote 1). If the critics of the French collection Michelin disregarded such taste for anecdotes, Marc Francon, who dedicated a doctoral thesis and a book to this collection, specified than under no circumstance were these books history books, and that the anecdote served to add a dash of flavor to the visit, offering to the neophyte a conventional access to history (Francon 2004, pp. 145–158). Some authors were content with telling the minimum, resorting to noun phrases or a list of dates. This lack of explanation and relation between events can create confusion, as Manuel Hijano del Río and Francisco Martín Zúñiga pointed out in their research on seven Andalusian guides published between 1920 and 1970:

In general, the analyzed guides used historical narrative resources that lack analysis and that are purely descriptive, exclusively using the chronological timescale as a means to organize diverse events in a very synthetic manner, and in many cases, overwhelming the reader with a sequence of dates of our past. (Hijano del Río and Martín Zúñiga 2007, p. 98)Footnote 2

The most scientific vocabulary and style, a canon of the guides, found in the geographical and artistic descriptions, are transposed to the historical sections. Nevertheless, no matter how overwhelming or scarce the historical data are, the discourse offers a glimpse of the ideology of the author, with more or less clarity.

To understand what type of history about the civil war and the first Francoist period was given to the tourists, we will first present the full range of publications related to traveling in Spain and France. Afterwards, we will describe the array of stances proposed by this historical discourse, as well as the strategies utilized to continue presenting the country as an attractive tourist destination for domestic tourism as well as foreign tourism despite the terrible conditions at the time.

4.2 Presentation of the Corpus

The corpus collected for this work consists of thirty publications,Footnote 3 among which we find travel writings, guides and brochures. Fifteen of them are written in French—we also include the translation of a German one, Baedeker. Nine were published in Spain by private publishers, while seven were published by the tourism institutions in place (a book and six brochures, in Spanish or French) (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1
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Number of publications

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The French part of the corpus consists of personal travel writings, guides and publications that are hybrids between both genres. It is not about explaining the nuances and connections between these genres (Galant 2016), but about emphasizing the presence of the main guides on the corpus, guides that were frequently republished, such as the ones by Hachette and Michelin. These publishers enjoyed a near monopoly in the French market as early as the nineteenth century for the former and at the start of the twentieth century for the latter. As for the private part of the Spanish market, no reprints of a same guide have been found. In fact, a monopolistic collection edited by a private publisher did not exist in Spain as in France, Germany or England. This is why the market appears to be more fragmented, with a publishing pause during the Spanish Civil War and the first years of the Francoist regime, as a result of the armed conflict and the economic situation of the publishing houses and the population itself. However, the phenomenon of the reprint was practiced by what would become the most important publisher in Spain, the State, through its institutions dedicated to tourism, via official publications with aesthetic and formats that changed in the period of our interest. However, the text was kept without any alterations except for some minor edits. For example, the Spain travel guide published by the Dirección General de Turismo (DGT ), around 1945—with an illustrated cover of a woman with a fan, created by Serny—was reprinted at least once, in 1959, and included the text from a guide published around 1935 by the Patronato Nacional de Turismo (PNT). This same text was also cut and used in various brochures. As for the publication dates, in France, the guides were published especially starting in the 1950s, while some had already been published in Spain in the 1940s, although not by the same author. This is due, first, to the start of the Second World War, in which France was involved, and later due to the relationships between France and Spain once the war ended: we should remember than on May 26, 1945, the French Advisory Assembly asked the allies to cease relations with Francoist Spain on ideological grounds. The victory of the left after the elections on October 21, 1945, increased the hostility toward the neighboring country, not to mention the execution of Cristino García, a Spanish fighter and commander of the French Interior Forces during the Resistance, resulting in the closing of the French–-Spanish border between March 1, 1946, and February 10, 1948.

As for the authorship of these publications, three guides in French are anonymous: the publications by Michelin Guide, Baedeker and the Arimany guide, for which we do not know if the editor (Miguel Arimany (1920–1996)), a Catalan poet and novelist, was also its author. Not much is known about Doré Ogrizek, editor and author of various guides found in the collection Le monde en couleurs and also the author of the À la page guide , which was found in our corpus. However, in a handwritten note by Luis Antonio Bolín, we found that the French writer did not have the support of the Director of the DGT. Thus, in the “Nota acerca de una proposición verbal hecha por Doré Ogrizek para la publicación de un volumen sobre España de la colección Le monde en couleurs”, dated May 13, 1948, the general directorate of tourism criticized the collection of the “juggler”, denouncing him:

[the] palpable lack of seriousness, due to the fakeness of its brochure and the pretentions of its proponent, these books remind me of those patriotic publications, commemorative books or tributes, etc., that with different masks, are simply a plot for the benefit of he or those who exploited, relying on vanity or candor, or on the shyness of those who are not brave enough to reject his contributions. (AGA, (3)49.2 TOP 22/44.203-52.704, Box 12107)Footnote 4

On the contrary, Bolín emphasized the quality of the Michelin guides in his correspondence with the co-director of the company, Robert Puiseux, and did not hesitate to help him, facilitating the sending of maps (AGA, (3)49.2 TOP 22/44.203-52.704, Box 12107). The anonymity of the Spanish publications from private publishers seems to be more frequent, with five books without authors among a total of ten books (Michelin (c. 1936–1938); La madre patria 1945; España, guía de arte, paisaje, folklore (c. 1947); Guía práctica de España (c. 1952); Vespa 1958), while in official publications, the signature of the artist tends to appear, such as Ángel Esteban, Josep Morell or Ricardo Summers Isern, better known as Serny, although the author’s name was omitted. Nevertheless, the guide to Spain from 1945 from the DGT overlooked the name of the author of the main text, but part of the book proposes a plural view of Spain thanks to, national or not, contemporary or not, authors, among whom we find King Alfonso el Sabio (Alfonso “the wise”), English novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), also the author of the well-known On human Bondage (1915), Rain (1921) and Don Fernando, a book published in 1935 whose story takes place in Seville, as well as French hispanist Marcel Carayon aided by his brother Jean (1895–1987), a military man.

In total, seventeen books include the names of the authors, and even if in some instances time has erased some personal and professional data from memory, some of them can still be identified, sometimes with elements related to their political leanings or commitments. Some publications present their authors as if to settle and reinforce their scientific quality. Such is the case of the Guide du touriste lettré, which is composed of a group of authors among whom we find the writer Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910–1999)—at the time when he was close to the falangist and Francoist movements—and Francisco Esteve Barba (1908–1968), a historian and a librarian at the University of Madrid, who also had a Francoist and falangist stance (Pasamar Alzuria and Peiró Martín 2002, p. 233). Under the denomination of “Men of letters”, we also find collaborations by Demetrio Castro Villacañas, a doctor in Law, a journalist, a poet and a falangist fighter in the Blue Division (División Azul), Maurice Junqua, Emile Brellot, Antonio Fernández Galiano and Antoine Massia. Individuals linked to the government, such as Eduardo Moya, a counsellor in the Ministry of Commerce, and Agustin Palau, a librarian in the Ministry of the Navy, are also mentioned. As for the historical section, it was authored by Henry Charbonneau (1913–1983), the director of the publication, along with Jean Carlan. Charbonneau was a member of the extreme right: he was indeed a member of the Action française, the Comité National and the Légion tricolore before becoming a member of the African Falangists. At the time of the liberation, he was judged for his collaboration and intelligence with the enemy, without being convicted. He was able to continue his activities as a member of the extreme right and dedicated his time to tourism books.

The figure of the French Hispanist is underlined in this range of publications, sometimes in the academic sense of the word, such as in the case of historian Yves Bottineau (1925–2008), a specialist in Spanish and Portuguese art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who spent some time at the Casa de Velázquez before working at the University of Nanterre, and Jean Sermet (1907–2003), an academic who specialized in the geography of Andalusia. Georges Pillement (1898–1984) was a writer and translator and a specialist of Spanish and Latin American literature. He wrote several books about art and tourism, and collaborated in various newspapers and magazines. French essayist Dominique Aubier (1922–2014), who participated in the writing of the Petite Planète (1956) guide, wrote about bullfighting, proposed an esoteric reading of Quijote in Don Quichotte prophète d’Israël, which was controversial among the specialists of Cervantes, and translated, among other works, Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega and the Historia de la conquista de México by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. His co-author, Manuel Tuñón de Lara (1915–1997), a member of the communist party and a member of the union of free intellectuals, moved to France after becoming a victim of the Francoist repression, and studied at the École pratique des Hautes Études under the direction of Pierre Vilar. He was appointed Professor of Spanish history and literature at the University of Pau in 1965, before returning to Spain in 1981 as an extraordinary professor of the University of the Basque Country. The personality of the professor is a recurring feature among the authors of our corpus, and these were not only specialists from Spain, as shown by the figure of Félix de GrandCombe (1880–1961), whose real name was Félix Boillot, a Professor of French Studies at the University of Bristol who published a series of travel books entitled Tu viens under a pseudonym, with volumes dedicated to England, France, America and Spain (1953). Another prolific writer of prose and poetry with a particular taste for travel was Albert T’Sertevens (1885–1974). Aside from his Itinéraire espagnol (1933 for the first version, and 1951 for the augmented one), he published travel books about Yugoslavia, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Morocco and Turkey.

For others, travel writing seemed to be a complementary activity aside from their other professional tasks, which were often, although not always, related to art and culture. Luis Feduchi (1901–1975) was a Spanish architect, who besides the guide on Spain also wrote one on Madrid, for the Afrodisio Aguado collection. Likewise, we learned in his guide that Mateo González Martínez worked as a lawyer in Seville, was the Director at a Savings Bank in the province of Seville and participated in the Spanish Civil War, for which he received a Campaign Medal, two Red Crosses for Military Merit, the War Cross and the Medal for Suffering for the Country. As for Geneviève Baïlac (1922–2019), she was a playwright who, aside from her story about her travels to Spain, also wrote about day-to-day life in Algiers, focusing on the French community. Edgar Neville Romrée (1899–1967) was also a playwright. He was known for his novels, his movies and his paintings. His political trajectory varied, as he moved from a republican stance to the opposite one when he was a war reporter with the nationalist faction, and produced propagandistic films such as Juventudes de España (1938), La Ciudad Universitaria, (1938), Vivan los hombres libres (1939) and Frente de Madrid (1939), based on one of his books.

Later on, writing a guide could also serve to disseminate a controversial ideology, such as in the case of Spanish paleontologist Ignacio Olagüe (1903–1974), to whom we owe a guide in French. This member of the royal society of natural history of Madrid, who was not dependent on any university, raised a controversy when he published a book entitled Les Arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne, which defended the idea of a religious convergence that resulted in the birth of a unique Andalusian culture, and not the Islamization of the region. He was also a friend of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, the founder of the JONS.

As for the French collections, collective writing was practiced with various collaborators, as the publishers were convinced, in the case of Hachette, that “[a] good guide can only be the common work of many minds” (Monmarché 1935, p. VIFootnote 5). Starting in 1927, under the direction of Marcel Monmarché, in the Bleus guides, the names of the collaborators are mentioned. Marcel N. Schveitzer, an agrégé of history and geography, who had been a member of the Casa de Velázquez in 1919–1920, was in charge of the volume dedicated to Spain with the help of his wife Marcelle, a composer, for the references on music, Emile Bertaux, an art history professor at the Sorbonne for the art section, and travel writer Claude Dervenn for the descriptions of the Canary Islands. As for the Michelin guides, the authors were not named, but we know that they were not specialists, although a history or geography degree was sometimes required, according to Herbert Lottman (1998, p. 411).

As for history and guides, the work by Manuel Hijano del Río and Francisco Martín Zúñiga has already been mentioned. It was created from a corpus of seven Spanish publications that were edited between 1929 and 1961. The authors observed that the history of the Muslim presence in Andalusia was always described, while the references to the Spanish Civil War were scarce, until they disappeared completely in the 1960s. Their explanation for this is that authors and editors wished to present a place that would correspond to the expectations of the travelers, pointing out that in the corpus, this desire to attract the tourist was more important than the historical truth:

History is utilized as a resource for the construction of an Eastern Andalusia that the traveler needs. It is not that recalling episodes of the civil war between Andalusians bother the traveler, but that they show a population that is divided into two “factions”, and that it is only a synonym of destruction and violence that is very recent in time. (Hijano Del Río and Martín Zúñiga 2007, p. 101)Footnote 6

4.3 Different Stances

Among the publications that mention the political events, we also took into account the ones that alluded to a particular event in the body of the text, and not in a section dedicated to history. In the corpus of travel writings, guides and brochures, eleven did not have any references to the Spanish Civil War or Francoism. These represented ten Spanish publications as compared to a single French guide, although the latter was written by a Spanish person. This does not imply that all the other French guides explained the conflict and the dictatorship in detail, as we will see later, but it can be understood in various ways (Fig. 4.2). Either the Spanish authors and editors wanted to differentiate the history of relaxation implied by tourism, or they wanted to silence the politics in order not to take sides. It is no coincidence that the only French guide that does not mention the war and the dictatorship was written by a Spaniard, Ignacio Olagüe, who stopped his historical narrative of Spain in the nineteenth century, thereby corroborating the thesis by Hijano del Río and Martín Zúñiga. Indeed, the author put a lot of effort in presenting Spain as it was observed by nineteenth-century romantics, as if it had not changed from the period when those writers described its picturesque, exotic and different qualities. The book by the DGT in 1945, as well as the official brochures, proceeded in the same manner, without moving beyond the nineteenth century, the golden period of romantic travel, in which the clichés were to continue to seduce many generations of travelers, and which the institutions preserved and utilized to disseminate the image of the country:

During the nineteenth century, Spain loses geographical and political volume, and in turn, re-evaluates that which had been greatly unnoticed: the beauty of their fields and Spanish towns, the character and customs of their people, who together with the great works of art, provide attractions for visiting the country where most diverse cultures took shelter and grew. (Esteban [1938–1951])Footnote 7

Fig. 4.2
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Publications that mention the Spanish Civil War and Francoism

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Likewise, the Guide of art, landscape and folklore, published in 1947 in Barcelona, ends the historical narrative with the reign of Alfonso XIII. The other publications that silenced the political situations were composed of the guide edited by Vespa, the Spanish version of Michelin, the books by Mateo González Martínez, the Guía práctica (Practical Guide), in which the organization according to the itinerary or the description of the city prevails. The one by Manuel Carballo, organized by region and in alphabetical order, included, in the descriptions of the city, a summary of the local history that scarcely included a reference to the armed conflict, as in the case of Toledo (Carballo 1952, p. 724, volume I). As for the publications that mentioned the historical events, one of them merely mentions brief phrases and facts without any type of explanation (Feduchi 1958, p. 53): “1936–1939 – Civil war; 1937 – General Franco, proclaimed Head of State”.Footnote 8

We see that it was mainly the French guides that linked the discourse of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism, constructing a Spanish historical narrative sometimes with the help of the natives, but overall from the point of view of the foreigner, either sympathizers or anti-Francoists. In Guide du touriste lettré, edited in 1952, Henry Charbonneau subscribes to the Francoist ideology, accusing the Second Republic of being responsible for the political and social disturbances and utilizing the expression “good forces” when referring to the Francoist army. He claims that he does not want to introduce the regime, leaving judgment to history, and this is merely rhetorical, as he speaks of the great work when summarizing the General’s deeds, who is described in a positive manner with a plethora of adjectives (“upright”, “austere”, “victorious”, “skilful”, “tenacious”, “hard-working”), through a binary structure and rhythm that evoke equilibrium:

[The Second Republic] lasted only five years and soon led to such political and social unrest that in July 1936, the country’s army and healthy forces rose up against this republic that led to communism. After three years of civil war, the National Movement definitively triumphed. It is not within our subject to present the new regime; history will judge the Generalissimo Franco and his already considerable work in all fields impartially. Let us just say that this upright and austere man, a victorious and skilful soldier and politician, this tenacious and hard-working Galician, has managed to keep his country out of the horrors of the last war, and ensures his country an era of stability that will certainly bear fruit, and that, most recently, he has just brought Spain back into the fold of great nations. (Charbonneau 1952, p. 51)Footnote 9

He praised Francoist policies and politics with terms such as “healthy”, “stability”, “bear fruit”, predicting a return to the international stage, “in concert with the other great nations”, an expression that conjures up harmony and power and that is related to the end of international ostracism.

In the Michelin collection, the facts are presented with an obvious objectivity, reenforced by the use of short phrases and the historical present, without resorting to the habitual anecdote, but in such a synthetic manner that it avoids analysis. Marc Francon remarked that the historical sections of this collection seemed to be from a school book, more or less easy to understand, and that the discourse was also dependent on the reader imagined by the author or editor. The geographer subjected the collection to a readability test, which revealed that the texts from this collection were similar, in terms of difficulty of comprehension, to a textbook from a sixième class, equivalent to the sixth grade in primary school (Francon 2004, p. 156). The Michelin guide contains a panel with relevant dates, and in our case, it mentions the Spanish Civil War and the emergence of Franco as the Head of State, but it also develops the narrative in a paragraph:

THE CIVIL WAR. – In February 1936, the Popular Front won the elections. Incidents started increasing. On July 12, 1936, the monarchist leader Calvo Sotelo was assassinated. On July 18, the “National Uprising” tried to put an end to revolutionary attempts. The civil war began. It lasted until 1939, merciless, aggravated by foreign interventions. On January 26, Barcelona was conquered by national troops. On February 27, General Franco’s regime was recognized by France and England. On 28 March, Valencia and Madrid, the last remaining rebel cities, surrendered. (Michelin 1952, p. 39)Footnote 10

In this case, the electoral victory of the Popular Front is associated to terms such as “incidents”, “murdered”, “revolutionary”, “rebels”, as if the result was the cause of the 1936 conflict. There is a certain ambiguity about foreign interventions—it is not clear if two factions are defined—but the vocabulary of the first sentence, as well as the mention of the recognition of the Francoist regime by France and England, can make us think that it was about the International Brigades. This small paragraph insists on the legitimacy of the regime, since, by suppressing the destiny of the republicans, the reading of the conflict seems to be guided and biased.

The other great French collection, Hachette, with the Bleus guides, whose level of reading is more similar to secondary school teaching (Francon 2004, p. 156), presents the events in more detail:

In the municipal elections of April 12, 1931, the first national consultation in eight years, the republican-socialist coalition obtained an overwhelming majority in all major centers. On April 14, the republic was spontaneously proclaimed in cities and villages, while the king was renouncing power and withdrawing to France. These days of effervescence and delirious excitement took place without any excess; a provisional Government, presided by D. Niceto Alcalá Zamora (later elected President of the Republic) was formed and the elections to the Constituent Parliament on 28 June 1931 clearly confirmed the republican and socialist orientation of the country; this assembly gave Spain a constitution with very democratic tendencies, declared the separation of the Church and the State, organized the autonomy of Catalonia and tried to achieve agrarian reform. Having accomplished most of its task, it was dissolved in November 1933. The Cortes who succeeded reacted sensibly; the Left resorted to insurrection, without success, and the government moved to a coalition of moderate republicans (radicals and Popular Action). (Monmarché 1950, p. XXXVI, 1935 text)Footnote 11

Despite looking factual, events are missing in the text; for example, the timid invocation of the change of biennium in 1933 and the revolution of Asturias. In 1950, the 1935 version was again published, with the addition of a few rose-colored pages that updated the narrative:

The surprising victory of the popular front in the February 1936 elections brought Manuel Azaña back to power with a revolutionary action program that only succeeded in plunging the country into almost complete anarchy: riots, looting, church fires, political murders, agrarian unrest, plots, etc. (Monmarché 1950, p. 4)Footnote 12

Here the term “surprising” refers without a doubt to the relative weakness of the left in 1934. However, if the creation of a Popular Front resulted in a tight outcome in terms of votes, the victory in terms of seats was broad in 1936: 263 members of Parliament for the Popular Front, 156 for the National Block and 54 for the centrists (Canal (dir.) 2009, p. 188). The narrative appears afterwards as a caricature and is incomplete, speaking about the “anarchy” of the Azaña period and as if the violence was only due to the leftists. Now, we know well that violence was the method of action for both factions:

Thus, the mass movement that welcomed the victory of the Popular Front responded to the attitude of Gil Robles, who wanted to prevent the new government from forming, and of some generals, such as Franco, Goded or Fanjul, all future coup leaders, who wanted to declare martial law: according to Paul Preston, a military coup would have been close to taking place just after the victory of the Popular Front. (Canal 2009, p. 188)Footnote 13

Indeed, the existing tension in the agriculture sector was palpable, as the day workers demanded the application of agricultural reform, but this tension was not higher than in previous years, according to Jordi Canal. What occurred was that the social conflicts were not viewed in the same light by the conservative press, which perceived the violence in that period to be the first indications of a revolution, just like the socialist press (Canal 2009, p. 188). As for the political executions evoked in the guide without a clear reference, it can be supposed that they referred to the execution of José del Castillo, a socialist activist and an MP belonging to the Assault Guard (also known as the Assault Corps), by some “right-winged assassins” (Canal 2009, p. 190), and whose death was avenged with the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo. While the guide evokes these events in a suggestive manner, it is a subject matter that was already widely written about by some historians, who showed that the coup was planned before the death of Calvo Sotelo, and others considered it as the trigger of the Spanish Civil War. The same guide specifies that “les troupes gouvernementales s’internent en France avec de nombreux réfugiés entraînés dans le repli (400 000 environs)” (“government troops are interning in France with many refugees dragged into withdrawal [approximately 400,000]”). The choice of the verb “s’interner” seems to be a hispanism: if in Spanish “internarse” simply means “enter” or “penetrate”, in French, the turn of phrase gives the impression that the troops came into Spain, when in fact it was the refugees. The reference to the republican exile was not clearly explained either. And, if we compare this phrase with reality, meaning that what the Retirada and “acogida” (hosting) truly were (to what historiography named internment camps), the use of the verb “interner” in French was particularly badly chosen. Moreover, in 1957 Roland Barthes had highlighted the Guide bleu vision of history in Mythologies, his collection of essays with a “double theoretical framework: on the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyse semiologically the mechanics of this language” (Barthes 1972 [1957], p. 8). According to Barthes, the latent Francoism is tangible in this travel guide:

It is true that in the case of Spain , the blinkered and old-fashioned character of the description is what is best suited to the latent support given by the Guide to Franco. Beside the historical accounts proper (which are rare and meagre, incidentally, for it is well known that History is not a good bourgeois), those accounts in which the Republicans are always “extremists” looting churches – but nothing on Guernica – while the good “Nationalists”, on the contrary, spend their time “liberating”, solely by “skilful strategic manoeuvres” and “heroic feats of resistance”, let me mention the flowering of a splendid myth-alibi: that of the prosperity of the country. (Barthes 1972 [1957], pp. 76–77)

Logically, La madre patria, a guide aimed at Latin American travelers, the “sons beyond the seas and frontiers” (1945), presents the Francoist regime in a glowing manner in order to compensate for the lack of existing publications and to stress the value of being Hispanic: “On July 18th, 1936, the civil war began in Spain, a fight that ended on April 1st, 1939 with the triumph of the army led (‘acaudillado’, in Spanish) by the Generalissimo Franco, who was named Head of State by the Governing Board that met in Burgos” on Oct 1st, 1936. The choice of the verb “acaudillar” refers to Franco’s title, warlord, to whom the words “triumph” and “generalissimo” are associated. We also find this partial and imprecise view of reality in later years in L’Espagne by Doré Ogrizek (1951), which tends to soften reality. Evoking simple “querelles” (“quarrels”) he does not mention the dictatorial character of the regime, proposing a guided reading:

In 1936, all the Spanish quarrels resulted in a thirty-month war without a truce or mercy, a war that was said to be the last one in which man played an individual role. At the head of the “national movement” and the Spanish army that had [been] raised, Generalissimo Franco took control of the situation: as early as October 1936, he had been proclaimed head of the Spanish state. Under his government, Spain remained on the fringes of the Second World War and organized itself, in the spirit of its “law of succession”, into a kingdom whose dynastic continuity will be determined in the future. (Ogrizek 1951, p. 107)Footnote 14

The terms “kingdom” and “law of succession” refer to the 1947 law according to which Franco had to choose his successor to prevent Don Juan of Borbon from naming himself as the legitimate successor of the dictator, in order to contain the anti-Francoist impulses that were expressed in the 1945 Lausanne Manifest. The guide does not clearly define the nature of the regime imposed by Franco. Is it due to ignorance, sympathy or carefulness? We should bear in mind that this author advised tourists to avoid political or religious subjects when conversing with a Spanish citizen, so that his stance makes one think that his strategy is based on concealment: he considered the country as a place of leisure, as a “pleasure periphery” (Turner and Ash 1975).

Under an apparent neutrality, the reviews could be imbued with ideology, like in the French guide edited by Miguel Arimany in 1952:

During the 1914–1918 War, Spain remained neutral. Later, the endless Moroccan war and social conflicts brought to power a dictator, General Primo de Rivera, whose fall in 1931 brought about the fall of the dynasty. The Republic was proclaimed and lasted until 1936. At that time, the National Uprising took place, led by General Franco; the civil war ended in 1939 with the victory of his troops. Spain remained neutral during the Second World War. (Arimany 1952, p. 263)Footnote 15

Within these lines, we find historiographic inaccuracies. Likewise, the arrival of Primo de Rivera is not perfectly understood: the choice of the verb “amener” (to bring, in French) is similar to a euphemism related to the term of dictator, but it could be a way of stating that after the coup d’état, the King Alfonso XIII named Primo de Rivera president of the government, making the regime a “dictatorship with a King”, according to the expression by Santos Juliá (1999, pp. 63–64). Without reproaching the omission of the period of General Berenguer, as it is usually understood as the closing period of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, we notice that with the use of short sentences, the author of the Arimany guide appears not to take sides, tending toward the synthesis, and evoking the facts as if they were all connected by themselves, with the use of passive structures that reinforce the impression of the irremediable nature of the situation, as if there was no other role except as a spectator of history.

On the contrary, in 1956, Dominique Aubier and Manuel Tuñón de Lara show a radically different stance: the fondness toward the republic and its anti-Francoist ideology. They are the only ones who take sides in such a manner, but it corresponds to their ideology and the purpose of the collection by Chris Marker, edited by the publisher Seuils between 1954 and 1958: “not a guidebook, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveler’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us” (Colin Marshall 2017). They perceive the Spanish Civil War as the prelude to the World War, and compare Francoism with strangulation and the end of political life. Picasso’s Guernica occupies two pages, as if to show the war wounds are still open: “it’s hard not to get your fingers in blood again” (Aubier and Tuñón 1956, p. 90Footnote 16). They refuse to silence the situation, which would mean, according to them, accepting the regime: “to take sides of silence on this war which still fascinates imaginations and intelligence would be to strangely betray the country one claims to present” (Aubier and Tuñón 1956, p. 90Footnote 17). Thus, the regime is compared to the black legend, where Franco would be the shadow of Phillip II and his Escorial. It should be specified that this collection was less disseminated than the others, proposing from the start a different approach to the places presented.

4.4 Promoting Tourism in Times of War

Aside from the publications during the Spanish Civil War published by the two tourism administrations, where the patrimony is linked to violence on both sides, there were some that did not mention the political situation of the country in the history sections. In these, we are interested in the techniques utilized to present a trip to Spain that is not muddied by the conflict and the regime in place.

4.4.1 The Disasters of War

The institutions on both sides denounced the destruction caused by the war and both published propagandistic material based on this reality, but with a clearly different objective. During the war, the republican side published brochures and posters with the slogan “Fascism destroys Spain’s art-treasures”. The six brochures of the series were published in Spanish and French—as they could be found in the Spanish Tourism Office in Paris—and each one of them focused on a monument: The Palace of El Infantado in Guadalajara, the Baptismal Font of Cervantes and the Tomb of Cardinal Cisneros, the Prado Museum, the Courtyard of the University of Alcalá, the Palace of the Duque of Alba and the National Palace. They served to denounce the places “damaged by war, whose responsibility is attributed to the bombing by the national troops” (El fascismo destruye los tesoros artísticos de España, 1937, Vol 1).Footnote 18 On their part, the nationalist faction accompanied the creation of the War Routes with a brochure entitled “Visit the War Routes of Spain”, which also existed in French, English, Italian and Portuguese, and explained how the Servicio Nacional de Turismo organized routes to discover the “traces, still burning, of an unbelievable period”, “in luxurious tour buses and 1st class accommodation”.Footnote 19 The brochure’s text presents the reconstruction work performed by the nationalist faction—“bridges destroyed and immediately re-built by the national troops”Footnote 20, the heroic character of the city of Oviedo but also the nice weather of the region and the architectural jewels such as the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, resorting to words by William Somerset Maugham. All of this together with photographs by the Marquis of Santa Maria del Villar, Diego Quiroga Losada, of the destruction caused by the war as well as scenes from everyday life, contrasted with the climate of tension: “chicas y dulce” (girls and sweets), “saludo emocionado” (excited greeting), “entusiasmo en Santander” (enthusiasm in Santander).

As for the guide by Neville, literary and personal, published in 1957, it does not offer a historical compendium but contains a reference to the violence of the Civil War.

In this village, they had a custom that was primitive and beastly, [which] consisted in the running of a bull that was tied by its horns, and then making it fall off a cliff. During the civil war, it seems that they did the same with some poor individuals who did not think as the communists, and based on this, Mr. Hemingway wrote the admirable chapter of his book “For whom the bell tolls”, which describes the scenario. (Neville 1957, pp. 98–99)Footnote 21

The idea of violence is underlined, and Neville, who supported the nationalist faction, employed the adjectives “primitive” and “beastly” to describe the violence perpetrated by the republican faction. Also, the use of the reference to Ernest Hemingway has a twofold consequence: first, it allows Neville to resort to a direct witness of the conflict, giving weight and veracity to his commentary—as Hemingway was a war correspondent—and second, citing the book, it suggests that a cultural and artistic object could be considered a source of memory as well as history.

Lastly, twenty years after the conflict, hispanist Yves Bottineau remembers these disasters caused by the Spanish Civil War without inquiring about the origin of the conflict or mentioning the dictatorship in the section dedicated to the historical summary. However, throughout his book, there are references to traces of the conflict. The author seems to pay tribute to the nationalist faction, underlining the role of General Moscardó at the Alcázar de Toledo, pointing to his “heroic resistance”(Bottineau 1959, p. 134), as well as the national resistance at the sanctuary of the Virgen de la Cabeza in Andujar: “during the civil war it was held by a few nationalists besieged for months, and their resistance is one of the most famous episodes of this terrible conflict” (Bottineau 1959, p. 187).Footnote 22

4.4.2 Maintaining the Romantic View or Striving for Progress

In some cases, the Civil War is alluded to as an event that could rescue the Romantic image of Spain that had seduced nineteenth-century travelers. Thus, Albert T’Serstevens who, as he recounts, also visited the war places with Colonel Moscardó (T’Serstevens 1951, p. 273), presents a book that contains many references to stories about seduction and flirting, evoking the memory of a woman with whom he visited the battlefields:

First there was Marie Jeanne. It is with her that I did almost all my trips to Spain . She followed me through the civil war and into the battlefields where I was a correspondent for a major Parisian newspaper. (…) I heard her laugh in the middle of a shooting in León, she walked around Toledo under shellfire. (T’Sertevens 1951, pp. 16–17)Footnote 23

It should be mentioned that this is the only reference to the conflict, a memory marked by the strength and the sensuality of a woman who seems to be as happy as she is courageous. Three years later, Geneviève Baïlac reacted in a similar fashion in her Impressions d’Espagne. Already in the introduction, a light tone is perceived: “This trip was undertaken with no other purpose than to have a great vacation. It was not prepared and the tourist interest presided over its development”.Footnote 24 The author is aware of the history of the country visited, but clearly relates it with the supposed national character: “Struggles have always dominated and, like the geographical harshness of the entire peninsula, they have forged a pure and conquering soul for the country” (Baïlac 1954, p. 31Footnote 25). She keeps on mentioning the “splendid isolation”, lightly referring to the dictatorial character of the regime and attributing the situation to the soul of Spain:

Spain has lived in splendid isolation and, when fashions mix across the rest of Europe, it continues to live only on itself, cut off from contacts with other countries not only by the totalitarianism of its political regime, but also by the disdainful indifference of its most profound soul. (Baïlac 1954, p. 32)Footnote 26

She defines it with adjectives suggesting severity and fierceness, presents the country as a place that is far from standardized modernity, the “homeland of the Authentic and the True” (Baïlac 1954, p. 32),Footnote 27 maintaining the idea of the supposed Spanish backwardness that is considered attractive here, in keeping with the style of the French romantics of the nineteenth century. The French were not the only ones who wanted to associate Spain with this stereotypical image, of brass bands and tambourines (in other words, festivities), exotically traditional, as the brochures published by tourism institutions, whose exact publication dates are not known with certainty, encouraged the same idea. Their text did not include any symbols of contemporaneity, and enthusiastically described the Spanish traditions, relying on drawings that only disseminated some well-known images d’Épinal that were very stereotyped such as Mudéjar architecture, the couple dancing, the flamenco dancer and the bull.

Besides taking up the “positive” clichés of the previous century, a few lines tended to be added to point to the good state of the hotel and the transportation networks, key arguments to facilitate the trip and to fight the pre-conceived negative comments about the lack of comfort in Spain inherited from the nineteenth century: “The hotels in Spain today are very comparable, in their respective categories, with the best in the world, and comparably, their prices are the cheapest. (…) The transports (trains, buses, plan[e]s and ships) are abundant and excellent, as well as the highways”. (Esteban [1938–1951])Footnote 28

Therefore, one of the strategies used for attracting visitors to Spain is the reference to progress in the country, trying to invalidate the idea of Spanish backwardness in many areas. Thus, Ignacio Olagüe in Pour voir et comprendre l’Espagne (1952) does not mention Spanish politics after the nineteenth century, but insists on progress with transport, electricity and the propagation of the industry which allowed Spain to conduct a “gigantic turnaround”. He continues: “That is why the visitor to Spain must not forget that the peninsula is the head of a bridge of a gigantic association of peoples that are today in full transformation towards progress” (Olagüe 1952, p. 82).Footnote 29

4.5 Conclusions

This study has shown that an object of mass dissemination that is theoretically apolitical, such as a travel guide, always has an underlying ideology, even if it is subdued, established with euphemisms or expressed directly. Various authors lean toward an apparent objectivity, but as much as they outline history, they can provide inaccurate information and leave other dates or events out. The proximity to the time of war could invite the travel professionals, many of whom are authors of guides, to omit it in order not to disturb or deter the possible tourist. In fact, only one guide from the corpus pauses at the war and presents a point of view that is contrary to the regime’s (Aubier and Tuñón 1956). Tourism under an authoritarian regime was encouraged in Spain especially during the 1950s when the country wanted to become part of the international institutions. The greater the democratization of tourism, the more it becomes an industry, and it seems that the authors and editors took a superficial stance in their text: the censorship of Spanish authors is easy to understand at the time of Francoism, and we could think that French authors silenced the events because their editors wanted to continue selling. The development of tourism coincided with the loss of freedom of the authors, as they had obligations of form and depth. The standardization of the genre of the guides, with their impersonal voice of autoritas, sometimes completely anonymous—which seems to have changed somewhat, as we are now returning to the need to present the author to legitimize the advice, as if we were dealing with a friend—tends to erase the ideology of this genre on the surface. Nevertheless, after reading a few lines, we have observed that the guides contain traces of an ideological discourse, which allows us to protect ourselves from another stereotype: the existence of a unique model of travel guide. Also, the importance of the selection of the information should be highlighted: if historical and political events have an influence on the images of Spain, the latter would not only be conditioned by these events, but also by the discourse that is constructed with them.

The lack of historical and political rigor and the scarce criticism could be associated to the tourist’s disregard, considered to be “frivolous and irresponsible” (JFS 1967, p. 11) but we should not forget that on the one hand, the publishers of guides want their publication to sell, hence the need to present the possibility of a nice trip, and on the other hand, the Spanish institutions could promote the image of a country in peace through their tourism publications.

In fact, the official publications could also take advantage of their dissemination to extol the merits of the regime within and outside the country. This was the case in 1964, in España para usted (Spain for you), published by the Ministerio de Información y Turismo. It existed in French, English and German, and it had been written and illustrated by the artist Máximo. With the humoristic tone typical of the author, the clear intention of an apology of the regime is noted, through an exacerbated patriotism, as well as the will to convert historical milestones into markers of national identity (the taking of Granada or the era of Phillip II). As for the Spanish Civil War, it is presented as if it was the only solution for finding peace and a “crusade” in the section “A war for peace”:

One day, in 1936, hate exploded. The world still remembers that three-year war which the Catholic Church named Crusade. (…) [B]ut we do attest the victory of part of the people that preferred a Spanish Spain , and not a Spain as a Russian subsidiary or branch. (Máximo 1964, p. 54)Footnote 30

Furthermore, the author attributes the mission of “renovating the Spanish society and placing it in conditions to truly cohabit in peace” to the National Movement and the year 1939 is perceived as the beginning of a “period of peace, still present, overcoming the old hate” (Máximo 1964, p. 54Footnote 31). Under this paragraph, the drawing of a dove, the universal symbol of peace, is here to confirm the ideological discourse presented here, according to which Franco would be “the winner of the war and the architect of peace”.Footnote 32 The presence of a national narrative is a cultural object disseminated in a subject matter that is particularly fecund.Footnote 33 We hope this study helps in the fight against the stereotype of the travel guides following a single model, only repeating the same text superficially, so that we value the unsuspected power to intentionally or discreetly influence a type of book that is often thought of as disposable.