Days of Hope

What occurs to me when reading Days of Hope is the amount of variation in ideologies between the different characters. The dialogue hints at a sense of unity among the various Republican factions insofar as the struggle against Franco is concerned, but also reveals deep gulfs between how they would ideally like society to be organized. The different factions of communists, anarchists, and everyone else opposed to fascism mostly all held genuinely left-wing, egalitarian ideals but their disunity and lack of a clear chain of command were what doomed them from the start, notwithstanding their clear technological disadvantages.

There’s a lot at play in this book and it feels like as one reads it the sense of despair and hopelessness that engulfs the characters only becomes more apparent. It’s somewhat ironic considering the title of the novel. The militias are ill-equipped to take on a well-trained and supplied army that has the support of two fascist states with a group of rag-tag peasants and laborers operating shoddy rifles that easily jam. It dawns upon the characters that if they truly want to win this war they’ll have to compromise their egalitarian and anti-fascist beliefs. But most of all they’ll need more technology that they simply don’t have access to: more planes, machine guns, and bombs.

Malraux’s emphasis on the technological aspects of warfare are what put the Republican’s situation into perspective. It all comes down to logistics: who has more machine guns? Who controls the train station? How many men do they have? This focus on technology, and the destruction it can cause, adds to the sense of hopelessness one feels throughout the book. It also helps one see how the Spanish Civil War was a sort of precursor to World War II. Though Malraux couldn’t have been intentionally foreshadowing (as the book was published before the end of the Civil War), he certainly helped set the mood for what was to come to Europe as a whole. The book helps one understand the political and ideological fervor with which people were acting. The conflict brought people from all over, inspired by their strongly-held beliefs, to fight for or against fascism in what they saw to be a global struggle. Spain was just one arena in which it would be fought, and it would overtake the rest of Europe and much of the rest of the world in the following decade.

I also want to make a note about the idea raised in class yesterday regarding the novel as possible pro-Republican propaganda. Later in life, Malraux was the French Minister of Information and then Minister of Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle, which seem to me like good positions for a propagandist. The idea that Malraux wrote this and emphasized the clear technological disparity between the two sides to try to persuade the French government to arm the Republicans seems plausible to me.