The Butterfly

La lengua de las mariposas

Saw this – subtitled in English – last night and was reminded of two things.

First, the French film Au revoir les enfants with a similar theme.

But second, the continuing lack of consensus about the Spanish Civil War and, in particular, the collapse of the republic.

Strangely, though the cases are similar, people are far less inclined to disagree all that much about the end of the Weimar republic.

Both republics fell to ideologically anti-democratic, right wing dictatorships justified by anti-communist and nationalist ideologies, in large part for lack of support from large and influential, ideologically anti-democratic sectors of the left: communists in both cases and anarchists in Spain.

This film, set just before the Spanish Civil War, begins by reminding us that the Spanish Second Republic was born in opposition to the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, the great landowners, and the large capitalists.

It neglects any mention that from the start it relied for crucial support on the large and powerful, but also fundamentally disloyal, anarchist and communist movements.

The main characters of the story, which takes place in a small town in Galicia, chiefly bring out the tensions between the republic and its enemies on the right.

One of them, Don Gregorio, is a public schoolteacher who has a class of boys at what appears to be nearly a one-room schoolhouse where he teaches Moncho, a child through whose eyes much of the tale is told.

Don Gregorio is a gentle and polite but outspoken, elderly republican, an anticlericalist and an atheist who is hated by the local priest and mistrusted by the more serious church goers, and not very cordially disliked by a rich man of the town who has a child not doing well in his class.

Moncho's father, a tailor, is of like mind with the teacher, but his mother is a devout Catholic much influenced by the views of her pastor.

The republican constitution of 1931 had proclaimed freedom of religion, something the conservative forces of the country and especially the Catholic church bitterly opposed.

And it had also thoroughly disestablished the church, by then long allied from the 18th to the 20th Centuries with monarchy and nobility against any part of the then liberal agenda in Europe or in Spanish America.

The republic replaced state funded but church controlled schools staffed with teaching clergy with secular public schools staffed with lay teachers.

The church was also forbidden to operate private schools, the clergy being banned from teaching and the Jesuits being expelled from the country.

In the film, news comes to the town that elsewhere in Spain radical anticlericalists have burned down churches and killed priests and nuns.

Matters grew worse as both anarchists and communists became more dissatisfied with and disloyal to the republic, and openly determined to drive the nation toward their own kinds of revolution.

That point is brought out in the film by mention of widespread, violent strikes and by a radio broadcast of a speech by José María Gil-Robles, a leader of the Catholic right, insisting Spain could not go on as it was but would have to choose between fascism and communism.

At the end of the film, the town has fallen into the hands of Nationalists who, under the approving eyes of the priest and the rich man, capture, beat, and march the town’s noted republicans down a street in which the populace, in a show or real of feigned reliability, angrily denounce them as reds and atheists.

Last among them is the teacher.

Bound, they are loaded onto a truck and carried off to their fate.

Blame for the fall of the Spanish republic is located by nearly the entire left on France, England, and the US for failing to come to the rescue or even supply arms and diplomatic support, though the film says not one word about that, taking place before and in the earliest days of the uprising of the generals.

The center-left has historically pointed out that the republic was undermined by the anarchists and communists and ultimately betrayed by the latter.

At least one of the people responsible for the Wikipedia articles on the topic has taken the line that the anticlericalism of the republic was extreme, wrong, and imprudent, and fatally weakened it by making support by republican Catholics impossible.

There is no indication what an acceptable anticlericalism might have been to these republican Catholics.

And the reader may judge for himself what sort of republicans these Catholics were who, per this view, betrayed their country into the hands of a right wing dictatorship that would last 40 years to recover what the Wikipedia writer calls their Catholic rights and the rights of the Church.