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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2020
The anticlerical violence of the Spanish Civil War has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, there has been relatively little focus on the iconoclasm, even though the destruction of objects was easily the most common form of anticlerical violence. Nor has the effect of iconoclastic violence on those who treasured or venerated these objects been examined. This article looks at the emotional significance of the material artefacts that came under attack during the Civil War. It argues that, while some objects were treated simply as the material of which they were made, most provoked more complex interactions. In contrast to most earlier episodes of iconoclasm, these also left a visual record, which shows how the memory of the violence was shaped not only by textual accounts but also by photographs that memorialised and aestheticised it.
The work for this article was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship: MRF-2016-109 ‘Religious Violence in the Spanish Civil War: Iconoclasm and Crusade’. Along with many other historians, I am grateful to the Trust for their generous support.
1 Letter from parish priest, La Alberca (Murcia), Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) Causa General (CG) Legajo 1068 Pieza 10a.
2 Moreno, Antonio Montero, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936–9 (Madrid, 1961)Google Scholar; see further Vicente Cárcel Ortí, La persecución en España durante la Segúnda República (Madrid, 1990), 234–43.
3 José Luis Ledesma, Los días de llamas de la revolución: violencia y política en la retaguardia republicana durante la Guerra Civil (Zaragoza, 2003) and ‘Qué violencia para qué retaguardia o la República en guerra de 1936’, Ayer, 76 (2009), 83–114; Julius Ruíz, The ‘Red Terror’ and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 2014); Mary Vincent ‘“The Keys of the Kingdom”: Religious Violence in the Spanish Civil War July–August 1936’, in The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, ed. Chris Ealham and Michael Richards (Cambridge, 2005), 87–8.
4 The fullest study of the perpetrators is Maria Thomas, The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931–6 (Brighton, 2013); see also her ‘Sacred Destruction? Anticlericalism, Iconoclasm and the Sacralization of Politics in Twentieth-Century Spain’, European History Quarterly, 47 (2017), 490–508; and José Luis Ledesma, ‘Enemigos seculars: la violencia anticlerical’, in Izquierda obrera y religión en España, 1900–39, ed. Feliciano Montero and Julio de la Cueva (Alcalá de Henares, 2012), 219–44.
5 See further Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles (Oxford, 2018).
6 See de la Cueva, Julio, ‘Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33 (1998), 355–69Google Scholar.
7 Albarrán, Aniceto Castro, Guerra santa: el sentido católico del movimiento nacional española (Burgos, 1938)Google Scholar.
8 Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (1997), 13–20, at 13.
9 Estelrich, Joan, La persecución religiosa en España (Buenos Aires, 1937), 52–9Google Scholar, at 57; Luis Carreras, The Glory of Martyred Spain (1939; first published in Spanish, Toulouse, 1938), 76–85, esp. 78.
10 Montero Moreno, Historia, 627.
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15 Montero Moreno, Historia, 627; the questionnaire circulated by Madrid diocese's Vicaría de Reorganización only asked about ‘cosas sagradas’ and did not include any request for inventories or exact numbers, though parish priests were asked about monetary value. Boletín Oficial del Obispado de Madrid-Alcalá, 15 June 1939, 137–8.
16 Montero Moreno, Historia, 629–30, cf. Aniceto Castro Albarrán, La gran víctima: La iglesia española mártir de la revolución roja (Salamanca, 1940), 130–1.
17 Castro Albarrán, La gran víctima, 90–1.
18 The Republican Ley de Tesoro Artístico (1933) was intended to protect and catalogue national heritage, including that in ecclesiastical hands; it remained in force until 1985. Rebeca Saavedra Arias, Destruir y proteger: el patrimonio histórico-artístico durante la Guerra Civil (Santander, 2016), 158–9; Miguel Cabañas Bravo, ‘La Dirección General de Bellas Artes republicana y su reiterada gestión por Ricardo de Orueta, 1931–1936’, Archivo Español de Arte, 82 (2009), 169–93.
19 David de Boer, ‘Picking up the Pieces: Catholic Material Culture and Iconoclasm in the Low Countries’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 131 (2016), 59–80, esp. 73–8.
20 This is the only area that has received substantive historiographical attention; see e.g. Julián Casanova, La iglesia de Franco (Madrid, 2001); Peter Anderson, ‘In the Name of the Martyrs: Memory and Retribution in Francoist Southern Spain, 1936–45’, Cultural and Social History, 8 (2011), 355–70; Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Before the Altar of the Fatherland: Catholicism, the Politics of Modernization, and Nationalization during the Spanish Civil War’, European History Quarterly, 48 (2018), 232–55.
21 Mary Vincent, ‘The Martyrs and the Saints: Masculinity and the Construction of the Francoist Crusade’, History Workshop Journal, 47 (1999), 69–98.
22 Feeling Things, ed. Downes et al., 27–96; Brundin, Abigail, Howard, Deborah and Laven, Mary, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2018), 113–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 On the history and nature of iconoclasm, see Mitchell What Do Pictures Want?, 28–56, 125–44, 158–66; Gamboni, The Destruction of Art; Besançon, Alain, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar; and Spicer, Andrew, ‘Iconoclasm’, Renaissance Quarterly, 70 (2017), 1007–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 See further Thomas The Faith and the Fury, 74–99; and Ledesma, Los días de llamas de la revolución, 244–69.
25 Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Madrid (AHDM) Legajo 2585 (Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles), letter dated 17 Dec. 1942; Simón María Besalduch, Nuestros Mártires: Religiosos Carmelitas asesinados en España, por causa de la fe, durante la guerra contra el comunismo Soviético que empezó con el Glorioso Alzamiento Nacional del 18 de Julio de 1936 y terminó el 1 de abril de 1939 (Barcelona, 1940), 363.
26 Saavedra Arias, Destruir y proteger, 119, quoting report now held in the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA).
27 Collier, George A., Socialists of Rural Andalusia: Unacknowledged Revolutionaries of the Second Republic (Stanford, 1987), 150–1Google Scholar.
28 El Greco's only known surviving sculpture. Seventeen fragments of the San Juanito survived, a mere 40 per cent of the original. http://es.fundacionmedinaceli.org/actividades/ficharestauracion.aspx?id=14.
29 Saavedra Arias, Destruir y proteger, 53–109; see further Arte protegido: memoria de la Junta del Tesoro Artístico durante la Guerra Civil, ed. Isabel Argerich and Judith Ara (Madrid, 2009); and Arte en tiempos de guerra, ed. Miguel Cabañas Bravo, Amelia López-Yarto Elizalde and Wifredo Rincón García (Madrid, 2009).
30 Joan Cid i Mulet, La guerra civil i la revolució a Tortosa (1936–9) (Barcelona, 2001), 42–116; Tres escritos de Josep María Gudiol i Ricart, ed. Arturo Ramón and Manuel Barbié (Barcelona, 1987), 89–109; Un testimonio oficial de la destrucción del arte en la zona roja: el libro de actas de la Junta Republicana del Tesoro Artístico de Castellón (Bilbao, 1938?), 11–90.
31 The Libros Inventarios de Cuadros list 22,670 canvasses while the Libros Inventarios de Objetos have 16,279 entries, though 48 of these are blank, Archivo de Guerra, Instituto de Patrimonio Cultural, Madrid.
32 Thomas, The Faith and the Fury; 45–73, 131–44; Juan Manuel Barrios Rozúa, Iconoclastia 1930–6: La Ciudad de Dios frente a la modernidad (Granada, 2007), 345–405.
33 The classic exposition is Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain (Cambridge, MA, 1968); see also Joaquín Romero Maura, La rosa de fuego: el obrerismo barcelonés de 1899 a 1909 (Barcelona, 2012), pp. 525, 532–4; the argument has recently been revived by Thomas, The Faith and the Fury, 20–44.
34 Sebastián Cirac Estopañán, Martirologio de Cuenca (Barcelona, 1947), 28 (NB: this is the only reference I have found to wax); AHDM Legajo 2585, letter dated 17 December 1942; Buenaventura Carrocera, Mártires capuchinos de la provincia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús de Castilla en la revolución de 1936 (Madrid, 1944), 235–6; AHN, CG, Legajo 1164-1; Saavedra Arias, Destruir y proteger, points specifically to the ambivalent status of ‘collectable coins and ecclesiastical gold and silverwork’, 66–8.
35 Espina, Concha, Esclavitud y libertad: diario de una prisionera (Valladolid, 1938), 77Google Scholar.
36 Ibid., 114; church bells became a point of contention in many areas after 1931; see my Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic, 186–7, 215–16; Fernando del Rey, Paisanos en lucha: exclusión política y violencia en la Segunda República español (Madrid, 2008), 167–70.
37 As at the church of Sant Vicenç de Sarrià, Josep M. Martí Bonet, El martiri dels temples a la diòcesi de Barcelona, 1936–9 (Barcelona, 2008), 152–3 and passim; Cirac Estopañán, Martirologio de Cuenca.
38 Orden Hospitalaria de S Juan de Dios, Violencias, profanaciones y asesinatos cometidos por los marxistas en los establecimientos de S Juan de Dios (Palencia, 1939), 27.
39 AHN, CG, Legajo 1164-1; Legajo 1015-2 Ramo 44.
40 Literally ‘sacristy clothes’, Manuel García Miralles OP, Los dominicos de la provincia de Aragón en la persecución religiosa (Valencia, 1962), 17.
41 Thomas, The Faith and the Fury, 114–16; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation’, Church History, 86 (2017), 112–54, discusses similar examples in a different historical context.
42 Violencias, profanaciones y asesinatos cometidos por los marxistas, 27.
43 Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge, 2008), 32–45.
44 Antonio Pérez de Olaguer, “Piedras vivas”: Biografía del capellán Requeté José María Lamamié de Clairac (San Sebastián, 1939), 68–9, 72–3.
45 Carrocera, Mártires capuchinos, 213–14; for other examples, Vincent ‘“The Keys of the Kingdom”’, 87–8.
46 Carlos Vicuña, Mártires agustinos de El Escorial (El Escorial, 1943), 57.
47 María Luisa Fernández and María Leturia, Catorce meses de aventuras bajo el domino rojo (Rome, 1939), 312; the statue was then demolished.
48 AHN CG Legajos 1038 (Almería), 1044-1 and 1044-2 (Córdoba); for another example, this time by a woman, Miguel Batllorí SJ, Los Jesuítas en el Levante Rojo: Cataluña y Valencia 1936–1939 (Barcelona, 1941?), 116. Press photographs clearly show the theatricality, not least in the fact that they are posed.
49 For a local example, Lucía Prieto Borrego, ‘La violencia anticlerical en las comarcas de Marbella y Ronda durante la Guerra Civil’, Baetica, 25 (2003), 751–72.
50 Vicuña, Mártires agustinos, 40; Besalduch, Nuestros Mártires, 321.
51 AHN CG Legajo 1038 Almería: Alboloduy (burnt on riverbank with clothes); Legajo 1044-1 Córdoba: Montoro and Palma del Río (thrown in river); Legajo 1041-2 Huelva: Almonaster la Real (burnt at boundary).
52 Obispado de Córdoba, Contestación al cuestionario 22 Nov. 1940, AHN, CG Legajo 1044-2. For attacks on heads and hands, see further Graves, Pamela, ‘From an Archaeology of Iconoclasm to an Anthropology of the Body’, Current Anthropology, 49 (2008), 35–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Christian, William A. Jr, Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain (Princeton, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe, 1500–1960 (Budapest and New York, 2012), 45–96.
54 Espina, Esclavitud y libertad, 104, 158; she reports ‘“quemarla viva” – según frase miliciana’, 112.
55 Vicuña, Mártires agustinos, 47; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Arzobispado de Sevilla, 8 Sept. 1936, 187.
56 On the talismanic use of religious objects, see La religiosidad popular, ed. Carlos Álvarez Santaló, Maria Jesús Buxó i Rey and Salvador Rodríguez Becerra (Barcelona, 1989).
57 For such claims, Thomas, The Faith and the Fury, 114.
58 ‘Diario de José S’, in Diario de un pistolero anarquista, ed. Miquel Mir (Barcelona, 2006), 175–7, 181–2, 190–2; for anarchist involvement in the black market in artworks, Saavedra Arias, Destruir y proteger , 157–90.
59 Castro Albarrán, La gran víctima, 122.
60 The Reformation and Counter-Reformation are the most obvious historical examples, but Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo's account of the 1868 revolution includes destroying churches and convents, shooting images and burning artworks and altarpieces. Historia de los heterdoxos españoles (Madrid, 1992), ii, 1337–8, 1353–5.
61 Bonet, El martiri dels temples, 17.
62 Jonas, Raymond, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luis Cano, “Reinaré en España”: la mentalidad católica a la llegada de la Segunda República (Madrid, 2009), 29–136; Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003).
63 Fernández and Leturia, Catorce meses de aventuras, 60–1.
64 Evaristo de la Virgen del Carmen, Martirologio de los Carmelitas Descalzos de la Provincia de Nuestro Padre S Elías de Castilla en la revolución marxista de 1936 (Avila, 1942), 59.
65 Batllorí, Los Jesuítas en el Levante Rojo, 10–12; García Miralles, Los dominicos de la provincia de Aragón, 65.
66 Fernández and Leturia, Catorce meses de aventuras, 208–9.
67 Espina, Esclavitud y libertad, 107, 214; they also hid their best clothes and household linen.
68 Correspondence, AHDM Legajo 2585, letters dated 27 July, 25 Nov. 1948.
69 Espina, Esclavitud y libertad, 43, 244; on the domestic rosary, Brundin et al., The Sacred Home, 97–100.
70 Rafael María Saucedo Cabanillas, ¡Hasta el cielo!: Biografía y martirio de 54 Hermanos Hospitalarios de San Juan de Dios (Madrid, 1952), 161; Vicuña, Mártires agustinos, 102, 116; Batllorí, Los Jesuítas en el Levante Rojo, 176, 213.
71 Carrocera, Mártires capuchinos, 33–5.
72 Batllorí, Los Jesuítas en el Levante Rojo, 72; for a similar case in Valencia, 107; Jesuits are presented with a crucifix when they make their first vows.
73 E.g. Antonio Torres Sánchez, Martirologio de la Hermandad de Sacerdotes Operarios (Salamanca, 1946), 125; Carrocera, Mártires capuchinos, 259.
74 Cabanillas, ¡Hasta el cielo! (Madrid, 1952), 37.
75 Besalduch, Nuestros Mártires, 279.
76 García Miralles, Los dominicos de la provincia de Aragón, 73.
77 Quibus, Misioneros Mártires, 95, 118–19, 121–5; Francisco Javier Román Solans, ‘“They went to their death as if to a party”: Martyrdom, Agency and Performativity in the Spanish Civil War’, Politics, Religion and Ideology, 17 (2016), 210–26,
79 Manuel Delgado, ‘Culte i profanació del Sant Crist de Piera’, Miscellanea Aqualatensia, 7 (1995), 87–114.
80 Jonckhere, Koenraad, ‘The Power of Iconic Memory: Iconoclasm as a Mental Marker’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 131 (2016), 141–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 142.
81 Eyeless virgins were used as the cover images for Castro Albarrán's La gran víctima and L'Illustration, January 1938, ‘Le martyre des Oeuvres d'Art’.
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83 Jonckhere, ‘The Power of Iconic Memory’, 147–9.
84 de Boer, ‘Picking Up the Pieces’, 79.
