First Intellectual Exiles

Exile began in July 1936. When the Civil War broke out, many of Spain’s best known liberal intellectuals felt that they had lost their country or, overwhelmed by the violence in both rearguards, would feel that soon. Many turned into internal exiles, others left the country. Some of the latter would return only to find themselves marginalized by the Francoist regime. Others would die in exile.

The most famous of all was the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. After offering clear support to the rebels in the first days of the conflict, he was disenchanted by the fierce repression unleashed in his beloved city of Salamanca and in the rest of rebel-held Spain. After the sadly famous incident with General José Millán-Astray in the main hall of the University of Salamanca, of which Unamuno was president, on 12 October, he locked himself in his house where he died on the final day of 1936.

Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who was in Madrid when the war began, suffered the same contempt and fear. Although he supported the Republic, he did not feel safe in the capital, and with the help of President Manuel Azaña he moved to Washington as cultural attaché in the Spanish embassy. When the war ended, the rebels sacked his house in Madrid. He would never return. After living for many years in the United States and Cuba, he moved to Puerto Rico, where he died in 1958.

The experience of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was somewhere between those of Unamuno and Jiménez. At the start of the war, he was ill, living in the Residencia de Estudiantes. Facing pressure to express his support for the Republic, he decided to leave the country, and began a journey that would take him to Paris, the Netherlands, Argentina, and Portugal. He returned to Spain in 1945, but he was not allowed to return to his university chair and lived under suspicion and official ostracism until his death in 1955.

Another horror story was that of composer Manuel de Falla. A Catholic with conservative political tendencies, he spent the entire war in Granada, but he was depressed by the savage repression in the city that claimed among its victims his close friend Federico García Lorca. This photo shows, from left to right, Federico García Lorca, José Segura, Antonio Luna, Manuel de Falla and Rafael Aguado on an excursion to the Calahorra castle in February 1926. Falla’s internal exile would turn into an external one., but while he remained in the country, the nascent regime´s attempts to make use of his name by appointing him to official positions without his consent. Shortly after the end of the war, he left for Argentina and, despite the efforts of the regime to get him to return, he never would.

Other liberal intellectuals like Gregorio Marañón, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, and Alberto Jiménez Frau had similar stories during the war. At the end of the conflict, the list of intellectual exiles would become much longer.