WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #351 - Culture, Read Pierre Salmon: A Combat Antifascism, Arming Revolutionary Spain - 1936-1939 (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 There are subjects that are already well documented that one might

think, clearly wrongly, that one has gone around them. This work by
historian Pierre Salmon, taken from his thesis work, is one of those
that surprises us on a subject that we thought was nevertheless
abundantly documented: the antifascist struggle and solidarity during
the Spanish Civil War. ---- The author is interested here in the
solidarity in action of antifascist activists who set up networks for
passing weapons to wartime Spain, a "revolutionary contraband", to
support the antifascist struggle, what he calls "combat antifascism".

Due to the abandonment of Republican Spain by the Popular Front, which
practiced a "policy of non-intervention", even if the borders were not
hermetically sealed, the arms supplies of Republican and revolutionary
Spain came mainly from the USSR. However, there were activists,
anarchists, Trotskyists or communists, who entered contraband to defend
"their revolution".

Alongside the more or less public actions of support for revolutionary
and republican Spain that were carried out from 1936 by the
International Red Aid (SRI), linked to the Comintern, the
Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee for the Defense and Freedom of the Spanish
Proletariat (CASDLPE) and the Committee for Free Spain (CEL) and after
the clashes of the May 1937 days in Barcelona by the International
Antifascist Solidarity SIA, more informal networks of arms smuggling
were organized between France and Spain.

It is these networks and their actors, the women who are very rarely
present seem to have been made invisible, the author tells us, who are
at the heart of this work: their (dis)organization, their setbacks but
also the journeys of the activists who took part in this solidarity in
action, often at the risk of their lives, less visible and also less
valued than armed volunteering.

Through this "transnational political commitment in a clandestine
context" it is a history of political illegality that is offered to us
here, at the level of the journeys of the men and women who engaged in
this revolutionary contraband.

David (UCL Savoies)

Pierre Salmon, Un antifascisme de combat: armer l'Espagne
révolutionnaire - 1936-1939, Éditions du Détour, April 2024, 256 pages,
21.90 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Pierre-Salmon-Un-antifascisme-de-combat-Armer-l-Espagne-revolutionnaire
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