ABSTRACT
One of the most powerful and emotional visual images of the 1930s was the newsreel footage of Spanish refugees crossing the Pyrenees on foot, in a desperate attempt to escape from the ravages of the Civil War. They were Spanish republicans who had hoped for military aid from republican France, but now, defeated by General Franco’s rebel forces, straggled across the mountains, the men often on crutches, the women in shawls clutching bundles of belongings, and small children in clogs, slipping on the steep paths which were covered in ice and snow. Over the border in France there had been widespread collections of money and clothes, organized by humanitarian groups and the political parties of the Left, and volunteers had been recruited by the Communist Party to fight in the International Brigades, defying the noninterventionist policy of France and Britain. By 1939 it was clear that the Spanish republic had lost, and the distress of the refugees symbolized the collapse of a cause which had fired the political commitment and the poetic imagination of a generation. A year later in France itself, in May 1940, as the tanks of General Guderian broke through the French defences on the Meuse, the French poured on to the roads in a gigantic flood of refugees, fleeing from the advancing German armies of Hitler’s Reich. An estimated six to ten million people took to roads and rail, with horse-drawn carts, bicycles, cars with mattresses on the roof, farm trucks and wheelbarrows, in a flight which mirrored and compounded the military catastrophe. The desperation of the refugees in the Pyrenees was terrifyingly echoed in the plight of those on the roads of northern and central France, from Picardy to the Limousin, from Brittany to the Auvergne.
