American journalist Herbert Matthews was sharply critical of the book’s re-contextualisation by Americans during the Cold War, arguing that its importance as an account of the Spanish Civil War had been eclipsed by its status as an anti-communist exposé.
Socialist reevaluation and communist backlash (1960s–1970s)
Another reevaluation of Homage came during the 1960s, as the emerging counterculture and the New Left brought a new generation of readers to pick up the book.
The anti-communist tendencies of the 1950s, which had buried Orwell’s positive depiction of revolutionary socialism, were partly reversed and Orwell was again reconceived as a predecessor of Che Guevara. In 1971, the Welsh socialist scholar Raymond Williams commented that Homage had been reevaluated, in the context of the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Protests of 1968, as taking a position in favour of revolutionary socialism and opposed to both capitalism and Marxism-Leninism.
This position was exemplified in Noam Chomsky’s book American Power and the New Mandarins, in which the author used Homage to directly compare the Spanish revolution with Vietnamese resistance to US intervention, arguing that neither complied with the “liberal dogma” of the American intelligentsia.
He speculated that the book’s status as a symbol of 1950s anti-communism would have been “of little comfort to the author”. Raymond Carr praised Orwell in 1971 for being “determined to set down the truth as he saw it.” In his 1971 memoir, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times declared, “The book did more to blacken the Loyalist cause than any work written by enemies of the Second Republic.”
The revival in the book’s popularity also triggered indignation from figures in the CPGB, which had never forgiven Orwell for it. In 1967, the historian Frank Jellinek expressed regret that the book had been exploited by anti-communists such as James Burnham and that it had brought the suppression of the POUM, which he called a “fairly minor piece of wartime expediency”, to a prominent place within historiography of the civil war. In the late 1970s, British communist veterans of the war, such as Thomas Murray and Frank Graham, denounced the book respectively as a “weapon” of the anti-Stalinist left and as a slander against the International Brigades.
In 1984, CPGB politician and former commander of the International Brigades, Bill Alexander, accused Orwell of lacking anti-fascist sentiments and called the book an “establishment” denigration of the “real issues” of anti-fascism.
That same year, Lawrence and Wishart published Inside the Myth, a collection of essays from authors hostile to Orwell, which John Newsinger described as “an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible”.
To Tom Buchanan, the sustained Communist campaign against Homage had been “so wrongheaded and ill-informed that it has probably, if anything, bolstered Orwell’s reputation.” He concluded that the legacy of the book, which cemented the repression of the POUM in popular historiography and damaged the reputation of the Communist Party, revealed the potential that single books can have to leave their mark on history.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary conception of Homage continued through the subsequent decades, with British film-maker Ken Loach notably adapting the book into his 1995 film Land and Freedom. Tom Buchanan comments that the film may not have been received as well if previous generations hadn’t been primed to view the Spanish Civil War through the lens of “the Revolution betrayed”.
Buchanan was critical of the far-left’s adoption of the book, pointing out that Orwell had never fully agreed with the POUM’s politics and that his view of revolutionary Spain “igniting the passions of workers around the world” had been naïve, given the prevalence of dictatorship at the time.
He also commented that Orwell’s revolutionary politics had been “unconvincing” and only a brief phase of his political development, which evolved and changed following his publication of Homage, as evidenced by his more moderate reflection in his 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War”.
Historiographical evaluation (1970s–present)
When histories of the civil war first started to be published, historians generally disregarded Homage as a primary source. In his 1962 book The Spanish Civil War, English historian Hugh Thomas wrote that, while he thought Homage was a well-written memoir that was “perceptive about war”, he also considered it to be misleading about the events of the war.
He thought that Orwell had misjudged the war by believing that revolutionary idealism alone was capable of achieving victory; Thomas himself believed that the only way that the Republic could have won the war was through a process of centralisation and militarisation, backed by the Soviet Union.
Tom Buchanan himself disputed Thomas’ assessment that Homage was “misleading” on the war, so long as it wasn’t considered a description of the conflict as a whole.
Paul Preston likewise cautioned against taking the book as an “overview of the civil war, which it is not”. In contrast, Homage has also contributed to a historiographical trend that centred the internal conflict within the Republican faction, exemplified by the work of Burnett Bolloten.
A revival of interest in the Spanish Civil War was later ignited by the Spanish transition to democracy in the 1970s, as a new generation of historians began studying the conflict and Orwell’s own account of it, which received increasing amounts of scrutiny over his interpretation of the events.
Gabriel Jackson wrote that Orwell had understood the civil war only as an analogue to the situation in Europe and lacked an understanding of the local political context in Spain. Michael Seidman argued that Orwell’s depiction of the “working-class paradise” in Barcelona was questionable, as he had only been accounting for the convinced militants and not the “indifference” of many individual workers.
Helen Graham pointed out how the internecine conflicts witnessed by Orwell had predated the civil war and Soviet intervention in the conflict, arguing against the “Cold War parable of an alien Stalinism which ‘injected’ conflict into Spanish Republican politics”, although her analysis of the consequences of the May Days ultimately aligned with Orwell’s.
In his own analysis of the book’s effect on historiography, Tom Buchanan found that research on the conflict had not entirely disqualified Homage, but had instead emphasised it as a “snapshot of a complex political situation” taken by an outsider.
Although Orwell himself warned readers to be aware of his own biases, mistakes and distortions, even engaging in self-deprecation over his own lack of knowledge of Spanish history and culture, Buchanan worried that people whose only insight into the conflict was Orwell’s book would “receive a very unbalanced picture of the conflict as a whole.” Buchanan concluded that the “very real danger” presented by the book was that it had been recontextualised, from an individual’s personal account, into a book that was seen as representative of the civil war as a whole.
Aftermath
Within weeks of leaving Spain, a deposition (discovered in 1989) was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason, Valencia, charging the Orwells with ‘rabid Trotskyism’ and being agents of the POUM. The trial of the leaders of the POUM and of Orwell (in his absence) took place in Barcelona, in October and November 1938. Observing events from French Morocco, Orwell wrote that they were “only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press.”
Georges Kopp, deemed “quite likely” shot in the book’s final chapter, was released in December 1938.
Barcelona fell to Franco’s forces on 26 January 1939, and on 1 April 1939, the last of the Republican forces surrendered.
Effect on Orwell
Health
Orwell never knew the source of his tuberculosis, from complications of which he died in 1950. However, in 2018, researchers studying bacteria on his letters announced that there was a “very high probability” that Orwell contracted the disease in a Spanish hospital.
Politics
Orwell reflected that he “had felt what socialism could be like” and, according to biographer Gordon Bowker, “Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it.” In a letter to Cyril Connolly, written on 8 June 1937, Orwell said, “At last I really believe in Socialism, which I never did before”. A decade later he wrote: “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.”
Orwell’s experiences, culminating in his and his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s narrow escape from the communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly increased his sympathy for the POUM and, while not affecting his moral and political commitment to socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.
After reviewing Koestler’s bestselling Darkness at Noon, Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism. He soon wrote Animal Farm, “his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism”.
Works inspired by the book
Orwell himself went on to write a poem about the Italian militiaman he described in the book’s opening pages. The poem was included in Orwell’s 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, published in New Road in 1943.
The closing phrase of the poem, “No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit”, was later taken by George Woodcock for the title of his Governor General’s Award-winning critical study of Orwell and his work, The Crystal Spirit (1966).
In 1995 Ken Loach released the film Land and Freedom, heavily inspired by Homage to Catalonia.
Homage to Catalonia influenced Rebecca Solnit’s second book, Savage Dreams.
