The Spanish Civil War (book)

The Spanish Civil War is a book by British historian Hugh Thomas, first published in London by Eyre & Spottiswoode (xxix, 720 pages, illustrated with photos and maps). It won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1962. A second revised edition was published by Penguin Books in 1965. A third, revised and enlarged edition was published in 1977 by Harper & Row, which was printed again in 2001 and 2013. Thomas said that the excellent reviews the book got on its release were a determining factor in his own life and career.

The book has been translated in various languages, among them Greek, French and Spanish.

Reception
Upon its release in 1961, John Murray called it "an exhaustive study, ably and conscientiously documented". In 1963, Robert G. Colodny wrote a similarly positive review, praising in particular the vast amount of research material examined.

Shortly after the death of Thomas, Pablo Guimón called it "a seminal book on the Spanish Civil War", "a highly influential work during the country's transition to democracy" and "a classic reference in the existing literature about the 1936–1939 period in Spanish history". Paul Preston claimed that "it marked the first attempt at an objective general view" of the Civil War.

Richard Baxell wrote that "it is by no means faultless; there are many errors of fact and judgement and Thomas has rightly been accused of occasionally valuing narrative style above factual accuracy." Baxell is also critical of the faulty depiction of International Brigaders in the first edition.

In 2018 Saveriano Delgado Crux, a historian and librarian at the University of Salamanca, questioned the veracity of the book's account of the verbal confrontation that happened on 12 October 1936 between Miguel de Unamuno and General José Millán Astray at the University of Salamanca, during a conference celebrating the discovery of America. While not denying that a strong verbal exchange between Unamuno and Astray happened on that day, Delgado argues that Thomas's account about the event derives from a 1941 article by Luis Gabriel Portillo (who was not present at Salamanca) in the British magazine Horizon, which Thomas came across in an anthology while researching for the book. He questions the reliability of Portillo's article, comparing it to a "liturgical drama, where you have an angel and a devil confronting one another. What he wanted to do above all was symbolise evil—fascism, militarism, brutality—through Millán Astray, and set it against the democratic values of the republicans—liberalism and goodness—represented by Unamuno".

Spanish translation
The book was forbidden in Francoist Spain. The translation and the publication of the book was undertaken by Ruedo Ibérico, a publishing house in Paris founded by Spanish political refugees. It was targeted by Francoist authorities, and was the target of a terrorist attack by a pro-Franco group. Copies were smuggled across the border with France, and Spaniards caught in possession of the book sometimes went to prison. For example a Valencian, Octavio Jordá, was caught at the French border with a pair of suitcases packed with many copies of the book. Jordá was later found guilty of "illegal propaganda" and "spreading communism" and sentenced to two years' imprisonment.

It was only after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 that the book could be freely distributed in Spain.

In response to Thomas's book, Franco's then minister of information, Manuel Fraga, set up an official centre for civil war studies to promote the regime's official historiography. So successful was the book that even Franco was regularly asked to comment on statements in it.

In 2016, the Spanish historian Guillermo Sanz Gallego argued that the Spanish translator, José Martinez, had manipulated his translation to follow an ideological pattern that favoured the Republican side. Moreover, the translation used less objective language than the original text in narrating events such as the assassinations of José Calvo Sotelo and Federico García Lorca. In the case of the Paracuellos massacres, the number of the deaths, several thousand in the original, was reduced to "approximately a thousand" (millar aproximado). Sanz Gallego's claims attracted attention from the media.