Homage to Catalonia is a 1938 memoir by English writer George Orwell, in which he accounts his personal experiences and observations while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia’s revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the interfactional May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the POUM was declared an illegal organization.

The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Initial reception was mixed, often depending on whether the reviewers’ analyses of events aligned with Orwell’s. Praise was reserved for his vivid depiction of life on the frontlines, while criticisms were aimed at his denunciations of the Republican government and Communist Party.

It received a second wave of popularity during the 1950s, after the popularity of Orwell’s novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) attracted a reevaluation of the book, with American liberal intellectuals presenting it as a work of anti-communism.

During the 1960s, figures in the New Left again recontextualised it through the lens of revolutionary socialism, opposed both to Marxism-Leninism and capitalism, which attracted another wave of criticism from figures in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

Since the Spanish transition to democracy, it has received a reevaluation by historians in debates about its quality as a primary source, with British historian Tom Buchanan noting its limited, unbalanced viewpoint and cautioning against reading it as a representation of the conflict as a whole.

Background

Historical contextDuring the 19th century, a motif known as the two Spains began to emerge in Spanish literature, in which writers such as Mariano José de Larra depicted a polarised Spain, divided into progressive and conservative factions.

When the Second Spanish Republic was established in 1931, it came at a time when Europe was experiencing rise in far-right politics, including fascism and Nazism. The Spanish Civil War broke out on 18 July 1936, when the Nationalist faction of the Spanish Army, supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, launched a coup d’état against the elected government of the Spanish Republic.

As the Republican government was initially paralysed by the coup, resistance to it was organised by the general population in cities throughout the country, culminating in a social revolution that saw anarchist and socialist workers bring Spain’s industrial economy under social ownership. By the autumn of 1936, workers’ militias had defeated the Nationalist coup in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, forming a frontline through Aragon and New Castile that divided Spain into Republican and Nationalist zones.

The Republican faction consisted of several different political parties and trade unions, of varying political positions and influence, including: the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), an anarchist trade union which controlled the Barcelona metropolitan area; the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a small Trotskyist party; the General Union of Workers (UGT), a socialist trade union which predominated in Bilbao and Madrid; and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and Communist Party of Spain (PCE), which had amalgamated together in Catalonia into the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC).

The French government of Léon Blum and the British government of Neville Chamberlain adopted a policy of non-intervention, ostensibly to prevent any escalation, but also motivated by their fear of revolutionary sentiments spreading outside of Spain. While the Nationalists were supported militarily from the Nazis and fascists, the Republicans found themselves economically and diplomatically isolated, forcing them to purchase military equipment from the Soviet Union. In order to combat the rise of fascism and defend the social revolution, thousands of volunteers came to Spain and joined the Republican militias.

Biographical context

George Orwell was born in 1903, in the Indian city of Motihari, which was at the time under the rule of the British Raj. He was raised by his mother in England and returned to Asia at the age of 19, in order to join the Imperial Police in Burma.

There he was exposed first-hand to the material realities of imperialism, which became the subject of his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934. Upon his return to Europe, he spent years living in poverty in the cities of London and Paris, an experience which formed the basis for his first full-length work Down and Out in Paris and London. By the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was already a committed anti-capitalist.

Throughout the 1930s, Orwell had become concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe and wanted to take action to oppose it. Although he did not speak or write about Spain during the first months of the conflict, so his thought process on the matter is not known, by the autumn of 1936, he had decided to go to Spain. In order to obtain a passport that would permit his entry into Spain, he initially went to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in London’s King Street.

When the party’s leader, Harry Pollitt, asked if he would join the International Brigades, Orwell replied that he wanted to see for himself what was happening first. After Pollitt refused to help, Orwell contacted the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

They accredited Orwell as a correspondent for their weekly paper, the New Leader, which provided Orwell the means to go legitimately to Spain. Orwell received a letter of recommendation from the ILP’s general secretary Fenner Brockway, who put him in touch with John McNair, the ILP’s representative in Barcelona and an affiliate of the POUM, a Catalan party of the anti-Stalinist left.

After putting the finishing touches on his book The Road to Wigan Pier, he departed for Spain on 23 December 1936. He briefly stopped in Paris, where he met up with his friend Henry Miller, before he continued his journey south by train, finally crossing over the France–Spain border and arriving in Barcelona by the end of the year.

Upon arriving in Spain, Orwell is reported to have told McNair that he had come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism. While McNair also describes Orwell as expressing a desire to write “some articles” for the New Statesman and Nation with an intention “to stir working-class opinion in Britain and France”, when presented the opportunity to write, Orwell told him writing “was quite secondary and his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism.” McNair took Orwell to the POUM (Catalan: Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista; English: Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), an anti-Stalinist communist party.

By Orwell’s own admission, it was somewhat by chance that he joined the POUM: “I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM. (I had only joined the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties.” He later notes, “As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists.” He also nearly joined Communist International’s International Column midway through his tour because he thought they were likeliest to send him to Madrid, where he wanted to join the action.

Chapter summaries

The appendices in this summary correspond to chapters 5 and 11 in editions that do not include appendices. Orwell felt these chapters, as journalistic accounts of the political situation in Spain, were out of place in the midst of the narrative and should be moved so that readers could ignore them if they wished.

Chapter one

Orwell describes the atmosphere of Barcelona in December 1936. “The anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing … It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle … every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle … every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized.” Further to this, “The Anarchists” (referring to the Spanish CNT and FAI) were “in control”, tipping was prohibited by workers themselves, and servile forms of speech, such as “Señor” or “Don”, were abandoned.

At the Lenin Barracks (formerly the Lepanto Barracks), militiamen were given instruction in the form of “parade-ground drill of the most antiquated, stupid kind; right turn, left turn, about turn, marching at attention in column of threes and all the rest of that useless nonsense, which I had learned when I was fifteen years old”.

He describes the deficiencies of the POUM workers’ militia, the absence of weapons, the recruits mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen ignorant of the meaning of war, half-complains about the sometimes frustrating tendency of Spaniards to put things off until “mañana” (tomorrow), notes his struggles with Spanish (or more usually, the local use of Catalan). He praises the generosity of the Catalan working class. Orwell leads to the next chapter by describing the “conquering-hero stuff”—parades through the streets and cheering crowds—that the militiamen experienced at the time he was sent to the Aragón front.

Chapter two

In January 1937, Orwell’s centuria arrives in Alcubierre, just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. He sketches the squalor of the region’s villages and the “Fascist deserters” indistinguishable from themselves. On the third day rifles are handed out. Orwell’s “was a German Mauser dated 1896 … it was corroded and past praying for.” The chapter ends on his centuria’s arrival at trenches near Zaragoza