Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [195]
20
From Franco to Berlusconi
I
Aspiring novelists are never short of a subject. When all else fails, there’s family and autobiography. Aspiring professional historians have no built-in guide to what part of the past they want to explore, and therefore in most cases what their reputation will rest on – the Tudors, the English Revolution, seventeenth-century Spain or whatever. Usually they acquire a subject at university, give it a title to get a doctorate (or, in my day, when Oxbridge looked down on such titles, a fellowship dissertation) and in most cases stick to their ‘field’ or ‘period’ thereafter. The war had blocked my own attempts to follow this path. So it happened that my first book as a historian, Primitive Rebels, was in a field I had not previously thought much about, and indeed a field nobody else had thought about at all.1 Essentially, it is a book based on my frequent travels in Spain and Italy in the 1950s, two countries to which my life and the fortunes of my writings have been linked ever since.
Unlike Italy – what antifascist would go there? – Spain, where I began to travel in 1951, had been part of my life for a long time – even before the Spanish Civil War, which made it part of everyone’s life in my generation. In spite of everything, after 1945 it was still a strange country for other Europeans. In the minds of most of us it still belonged to a curious realm where the images of revolution, war and defeat in arid landscapes were superimposed on the images of exoticism – flamenco, castanets, bullfights, Carmen, Don José, Escamillo – and those of a generic ‘Spanishness’ – Don Quixote, honour, pride and silence. My uncle had been there and had got to know people there in his time with Universal Films. The relics of his visits filled odd corners of our house: a banderilla soaked in dry blood, a book on bullfighting, a signed photo of an elderly, military-looking Catalan autonomist leader and the like. After the 1934 insurrection in Asturias, a friend sent him copies of the Spanish illustrated papers, I imagine the monarchist ABC with dramatic pictures. And then, in the summer of 1936, in the first weeks after the generals’ rising, thanks to a curious combination of historical circumstances, for a brief moment I saw it myself.
I was then living in Paris for three months before going up to Cambridge, on a grant from the London County Council to improve my French. One day at the end of July I discovered to my agreeable surprise that I had bought a winning lottery ticket. It did not amount to much – I remember it as 165 Francs or about £2–3. Fortunately the new Popular Front government of France had shortly before introduced one of its rare lasting innovations, les congés payés (holidays with pay) and – thanks to another innovation, an undersecretaryship of sports and leisure – ultra-cheap rail travel to enable the population to enjoy them. I therefore used my lottery winnings to take the train from Orsay station – still half a century away from being turned into a museum of nineteenth-century French art – to the Pyrenees for a fortnight of walking, youth hostelling and camping. Halfway through this superb excursion I was introduced to a more expeditious form of cheap movement by one of those peripatetic young central Europeans who in those days pioneered hitchhiking (‘Tippeln’, ‘Autostop’) on this side of the Atlantic. And so I found myself, carried from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean side of the Pyrenees, in a youth hostel close to the Spanish border near the town of Puigcerda. The occasion was too tempting. I went to the frontier, and was turned back by the young militia man who guarded it. I did not have the right papers. I walked a mile or so to the next crossing, where they let me pass without