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Foster Chamberlin, "Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War" (Louisiana State UP, 2025)
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Foster Chamberlain
Do not just talk the talk.
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It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to to listen right now.
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Foster Chamberlain
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Reuben Silverman
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name's Reuben Silverman and with me today is Foster Chamberlain, an assistant teaching professor at Northern Arizona University. His work has been published in Warren Society, European History Quarterly, and iaer. He is also the host of the podcast Historias, which features new academic work on Spanish history. Today we will be discussing his new book, Uncivil Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War, which was published in 2025 by Louisiana State University Press. Now, Foster, I happen to have had the privilege of knowing you for many years, but our listeners have not. So if we could start with a little bit of a background about yourself, about what drew you to the study of Spanish history in general, and what made you interested in a topic like the Civil Guard in particular, that would be wonderful.
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Foster Chamberlain
Oh, sure. Well, first of all, thanks a lot, Ruben, for having me to do this podcast, because I've known you for a long time, so it's really exciting to be able to talk about my work with you. So I think in terms of the origins of actually goes all the way back to when I was a teenager. And I suppose, like a lot of teenage boys, I was interested in War ii and I was also studying Spanish. And so when I was an undergraduate, I had a chance to study abroad in Seville. And it was at that time that I started getting into the Spanish Civil War in terms of thinking about the origins of World War II. And it wasn't long before I started thinking about, okay, well, what about the origins of the Spanish Civil War. And that really drew me to the Second Republic period. So just Prior to that, 1931 to 1936, among the various causes of the Civil War, arguably political violence is the most important one, because if you look at the justification that the military rebels used for their rebellion, and that's what kicked off the Civil War, political violence was the primary one. They said that the country had become unstable, that perhaps even a communist revolution was imminent. And so that's why they needed to intervene with a strong hand. And so, in any case, as I started focusing in on political violence during the Second Republic period in particular, and so now this would be when I'm beginning graduate school at UC San Diego, as I was reading about this, the Civil Guard kept coming up as a key player in that violence, and yet one that hadn't been studied that much. And so that's what kind of gave me the idea for the project to focus in on this police force that was so critical to that violence, but that had been previously relatively overlooked. You know, there were some works, but not. Not a study of the. Of the culture of the institution itself. So that's what I really became interested in.
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Reuben Silverman
Well, okay, so let's talk a little bit about the Civil Guard police force, then. What. What was it? And what were its origins and why was it so controversial at the time that the Republic was established? And why was it involved in all this violence that you were seeing happening at this time?
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Foster Chamberlain
Yeah, well, so the Civil Guard is or was Spain's largest police force, and it still is. It's a gendarmerie. So it is a force with a militarized structure, but its primary job is policing the civilian population, and it usually conducts that policing in rural areas, although sometimes it'll be involved in cities as well. And so, you know, all that is still true to this day. And I would say most countries in the world have some sort of gendarmerie like this based on the French model. They were the first, although, you know, it's one that we're not entirely familiar with here in the US because we. We don't have a force exactly like that here in the US in case the Civil Guard was founded in 1844. Because, like I said, in France, you have the gendarmerie national emerging in the Napoleonic period that was based on even earlier forces. And so liberals going into the 19th century in many countries were seeking to found a similar force for their own country. As you have the central government increasing in power in this period then it was really Important to have a force that was under the control of the central government and that would enforce its laws in all parts of the country, including in rural areas. So there had been several previous attempts to do this in the early 19th century in Spain, but these forces hadn't lasted for more than a few years because they were always associated with a particular faction. And if you know anything about Spanish history, you'll know that the story of the mid 19th century is one of one coup after another, Pronunciamientos they are called. And this constant switching back and forth between the Molarados, the Moderates, and the Progresistas, the Progressives, the two main liberal parties in Spain. So as soon as one of those parties would take power, they would dissolve the force that the previous party had instituted. So in 1844, it was the Moderates who were in power at that time, and they founded this force. And then the question was, how do we establish something that won't just get dissolved the next time? The Progressives managed to take power. And so in the early days, and there were even practices within the Moderate party too, there were debates about whether the force should have a civilian or a military structure. And eventually a military structure was decided upon, that it would give the force a strong discipline. That was the hope. But it wound up with this name, Civil Guard, since the original idea was that it would be civilian. And so the name is sort of a misnomer, actually. And that's what I kind of alluded to in the title of the book. Now, the first Director General of the Civil Guard was a guy by the name of the Duque del Mara. And so he was a blue blooded aristocrat, really a member of this most conservative faction of liberalism. And so he drew upon his own aristocratic values as he went about shaping the organizational culture of the Civil Guard. And so became, he really became instrumental in shaping that culture. And more than anything else, the value that he really drew upon was honor. And so he really made that central to the Civil Guard's founding regulations, which were pretty much unaltered all the way up until the time of the Second Republic. And so then you also asked about why the group became so controversial. So, you know, another kind of core part of its organizational culture was a commitment to political neutrality. And in that sense Almada was successful, you know, that eventually the Progressistas did take power again, but they didn't dissolve the Civil Guard because they started to see the usefulness, you know, again, of having this nationwide institution that would enforce the laws of the state. And so, at least through the time of the Second Republic, the Civil Guards always tried to maintain that political neutrality, at least on surface. But it wasn't always easy, because in these little towns where they're posted, El Matto also kind of designed them so that they would be isolated from the populations they were policing, so they wouldn't be corrupted. So they lived in these casas coarteles, these barracks on the outside of the city. But then, of course, they start to develop this kind of antagonistic relationship with the peasants in particular, because they are so distant from them. On the other hand, they develop close relationships in many cases with the power holders in these towns, which were principally, you know, the mayor and the landowners and the clergy. And then, of course, the Civil Guards themselves, they were really the other big power in these towns. There would always be informal things, like sometimes they'd be out, invited over for dinner, or a lot of times it was the towns that would pay for the housing of the Civil Guards. Many times they would be asked to guard the property of landowners as well. And so for many of the. Of the poorer people in these areas, they really came to see the Civil Guards as defenders of the right, you know, the strong arm of the landowners and so forth, even if that's not how they. How they saw themselves. Now, I'll just add one more thing in terms of how this increasing animosity between the working classes and the Civil Guard developed, because during the Restoration period, so that is from 1875 to 1923, and then you have the prima viderovera dictatorship after that, this is a time where it was a liberal regime, but it was basically rigged the election, so it wasn't a true democracy. So it was a regime without much legitimacy. And there were all kinds of small insurrections and protests and so forth, developing anarchist movement. And so the Restoration tried to have a very strong hand to clamp down on any kind of dissent. And the Civil Guards were usually the ones providing that strong hand. This is the period where we really see them being used more as a force of repression, you know, which was also not really their regional intent. It's more about enforcing laws in rural areas. And in particular, one of the chapters I book of the book, I look at these anarchist terrorist attacks that occurred in Barcelona in the 1890s. Essentially, the Barcelona police couldn't handle this situation. And so the Civil Guard was called in. And so they arrested hundreds of people, tortured many of them to try and get confessions. That was their method of criminal investigation. They'd already done this in several places in rural areas, but it hadn't really gotten much attention. But once they did this in an urban area and some of the people arrested were prominent writers and so forth, then it did get attention and actually became a scandal of international proportions. And so I think as the Civil Guard was increasingly being called in to be this force of political repression, including in urban areas, without really having the tools to be able to do that kind of work, that's where you see that animosity with the working classes really developing during that restoration period.
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Reuben Silverman
Well, so you've given us this sense of the relationship of the Civil Guard to the society at large and how that's connected with its organizational culture. You've also mentioned honor a bit and the role of honor. I'd like to maybe get into these just a little bit more in the sense of what does honor mean to them? And maybe we can think about this as what sort of people are joining the Civil Guard. You talk about this in the book. So maybe we can think about it in these terms. Who was joining and what would these ideas have meant to them about honor? And how does this explain some of the violence that we're seeing happening in this period that you're describing in the late 1800s, early 1900s, right, yeah.
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Foster Chamberlain
Yeah. Thanks for that question. Because that really gets to kind of the. The heart of the argument in the book, because that is essentially my research question. Let me just read you the very. The very first sentence of the book. Spain's Second Republic period saw more deaths due to political violence in just those five years than did Italy, Germany or Austria in their respective periods of interwar democratic breakdown. So that's really what kind of got me interested in this is. You know, this is actually a very violent period, actually more so than the period of those fascist takeovers in those other countries. And this is before the Spanish Civil War starts. So how did this happen? And then a prominent historian in Spain, Eduardo Gonzalez Calleja, he cataloged all the instances of political violence during the Second Republic, and what he found was that the Civil Guard was the most violent organization in Spain at that time. And so that was kind of my research question was, why was that? I think that that's where the organizational culture really comes in, because like I said, most of these other countries, because a lot of times the argument is made, well, it was a chaotic time and there were a lot of protests. And so naturally there's going to be some police violence. But if you look at these other countries, well, those are also chaotic. Times with a lot of protests, and yet the police weren't nearly as violent. So what was different about the Civil Guard? And that's where I think that organizational culture really comes in. When we talk about organizational culture, we're really just talking about the unwritten assumptions that guide the behavior of members of an organization, particularly in times of crisis, where there might not necessarily be strict protocols that they're supposed to follow, but because of the more informal things that they've learned as a member of that organization, there are going to be default ways in which they're going to behave. And it's an idea that actually originates in the business world, but can be applied to all kinds of different organizations, military organizations, police organizations. And I argue that we really have to look at both military and police culture when we're talking about the Civil Guard, because it's really both those things. It's a military organization that is primarily conducting these civilian policing. That's its main job. Now, you asked who was joining the Civil Guard, and that's something that's really interesting to me because if you look at the backgrounds of the enlisted men anyway, most of them are coming from peasant backgrounds, landless laborers, effectively the same backgrounds as most of the people they're policing, and especially the ones that they're most coming into conflict with. So how is that possible? Well, that's again where I think the organizational culture is very important. I mean, there are certain people who are drawn to the Civil Guard to begin with, seems to be people who tend to be very religious, and also from certain areas of the country, especially Galicia in the northwest, which is a more conservative area. But even so, it is those structures that Almada built, whether it's their sort of strange looking uniforms with the tricorner hat, that you might have seen that isolation in the special barracks, and a strong sense of community and solidarity within the Civil Guard, all of those things. And that usually they were required to learn how to read and write as well. So these are all things that start to distance them from the people they're policing, even if they come from the same backgrounds originally. That's why that idea of police culture is so important, because you can find similar patterns in many police organizations all around the world. This us versus them mentality, since nobody likes to see the policeman show up on their doorstep, so there's automatically this sort of antagonistic relationship with the populace. And so that's why policemen have such a strong sense of solidarity that they really feel like they need to stick by each other, because nobody else Will. And so, yeah, you see that in police organizations all over the world, but I think it's especially strong in the case of the Civil Guard. Now, finally, you asked how that organizational culture, and especially honor, actually factors into that violence. And again, I think honor is really central to their culture, although it's not the only characteristic. Other elements are typical of a military culture, like discipline and sacrifice, and those were especially important for militaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And then also that political neutrality that I mentioned before. But in terms of honor, in particular, if you look at the regulations of the Civil Guard, which, again, hadn't really changed since the founding, violence could be used against protesters not only if Civil Guards were physically assaulted, but also if there were injuries to their honor. So in many cases, this was actually authorized by their regulations. But I think even going beyond that, it was very important for them that the public show them respect. You know, that was how they got honor. And when that didn't occur, then they sometimes turn to violence in order to kind of force people to show them respect. And what I argue is that that is something that increasingly occurred as we go through the history of the Second Republic and the increasingly violent confrontations that emerged with the working classes during that period.
- [20:08]
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Reuben Silverman
Yeah, well, that's. That's helpful. So, you know, this book, it's built around a series of case studies, and you already mentioned Barcelona as one of them. But these are, you know, violent incidents involving the Guard. And after Barcelona, another pair that really stands out are in Castel Blanco and Arnedo. So how are these two local incidents shaped by national politics, and how did they come to shape the national politics as well?
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Foster Chamberlain
Yeah, I'm glad you noticed this, because I think they are two important examples. And that's exactly one of the points I try to make, is how these local incidents can really have. There's this dynamic with the national level as well. So starting with Casablanco, one of the sort of national dynamics that you see is that increasing political mobilization and politicization. That's kind of one of the Big themes of the Second Republic. And of course, that's a process that had been going on for a while, but reaches its climax in the Second Republic, especially in a lot of these rural areas. You didn't really see much political mobilization until this time. Ponco is in the Extremadura region in southwestern Spain, and it's one of the poorest regions of Spain. And so the ugt, which was the Socialist Union, was just starting to make inroads into that area and the Barouvos Province in particular. This was the first time that the UGT was launching a protest right at the end of 1931 in that region. And the thing that they were protesting against was the abuses of some of the Civil Guards in that province. And so I think that's one of the kind of patterns that you notice as you go through these different incidents, is that it's actually the. It's often the actions of the police force itself that are then leading to the protests. You know, they're the ones who are actually causing the protests. And then it's, of course, during those protests that sometimes violence breaks out. In Castel Blanco itself, they decided to go on strike December 31, 1931. And this is the first time that there had ever been a strike in that town. And so there are four Civil Guards in the town. And one of the other things that I observed, because I discovered a letter by the corporal who's leading these four guards to his former mentor. And he describes how the previous Civil Guard there had let people in particular pick acorns on private land. You know, this kind of shows how poor people were, that they. Not only did they not have land at their of their own, but they had to rely on acorns for food to survive. So in any case. But then when this new Civil Guard, Kaval Blanco, came in, he didn't allow that anymore because, you know, it's not actually legal to be taking this food on private property. And so that was really resented in the town when he was enforcing this law. So here you can really see these sort of two forms of policing where you have the stricter enforcement of the law, which was usually the kind of policing that the Civil Guard emphasized. But then this also, this need to adapt to the more informal structures and dynamics of these small towns. And that's something that Civil Guards often did, even if perhaps they didn't want to admit it. But when you have someone who comes in who really buys into that organizational culture that says, we're going to enforce the strict letter of the law, then that's going to lead to a lot of resentment. So that resentment was already there. But then what you also see in these instances is the decisions of individuals can really make a difference, too. So in this case, he marched his four guards right into the middle of the protest. You know, you're not supposed to do. They're supposed to stand on the outside. And then when a Civil Guard shoves, perhaps open fire on one of the protests, then the townspeople seized all four guards and beat them to death with sticks and stones and whatever they had at hand. So this is an unusual case because it was actually the townspeople killing the guards. Usually it was vice versa. But here's where you can see the national reaction. Because the Director General of the Civil Guard at this time, Jose Sanjurjo, he seems to have not been bothered as much by the fact that four Civil Guards were killed, but rather by the fact that the honor of the Civil Guard had been disrespected in this manner. And so he makes some sort of impolitic remarks afterwards, calling Casablanco a Riffian hideout and so on. So he actually drew a parallel with the colonial situation in Morocco. Meanwhile, the leading socialist in the area, Margarita Nelkin, she continued to criticize the Civil Guard. She had been one of its prominent critics, even though they were the ones who had actually been killed in this incident. And so that's another thing that's going to increase resentment and that you're going to see a lot, because the Civil Guard or the Socialists, rather, they often criticize the Civil Guard, but really as a means to mobilize people, because that was something that a lot of townspeople had these resentments towards, but they never actually succeeded in getting the Republican governments to enact substantial reforms of the civil garden itself. Now, in the other incident, our NATO, this one is in La Rioja, so one of the northern provinces, you see a very similar situation. This is a town where you have shoe manufacturing. Socialists are mobilizing people, organizing them in the union, really, for the first time. And so a protest breaks out there as well, just a week after the Casablanco incident, this time against a employer who had fired people because of the way that they had voted. In this incident, the Civil Guards opened fire and killed 11 people, including women and children, in this protest. And again, it seems that some of the rhetoric of the socialist leaders during the protest had been against the Civil Guard. And so there already may have been resentments there. It was kind of a common rhetorical technique for mobilization. But the lieutenant who was in charge, who was not the cream of the crop, if you look at his service record, also seems to have panicked and either gave the order or opened fire, or not stopped guards when they did. Now, meanwhile, the leaders are meeting in the town hall to discuss this strike, including the lieutenant colonel of the province. Once he makes it down the stairs, he tells the guards to stop firing, and they do. But nobody had said that previously, so a lot can depend on the individual commanders as well. So in any case, this incident, too, had national implications, because this time, even though civil guards were the ones doing the killing, San Jorge, he seemed to sort of dismiss their actions and essentially say that, well, you know, sometimes there are going to be casualties in the line of duty. And so the prime minister, Emmanuel Azania, had to wind up dismissing him as the director general of the Civil Guard for those remarks. And that's something that really upsets on Jorgeo, because now he felt that his honor had been disrespected, Even though, I mean, the director generals aren't members of the Civil Guard themselves. They're members of the military, military of the army. But you can see how the military culture of that institution was influencing these developments as well. So that's part of the reason why he was one of the leaders of a coup attempt against the republican government in August of 1932. That coup isn't successful, but it goes to show you how just a few of these incidents of violence involving the Civil Guard can really have political repercussions at the national level.
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Reuben Silverman
Okay, so that gives us a good sense of the violence and tensions in 1931, 1932, and then we come to 1934, and there's this uprising in the northern province of Asturias. And you're arguing that this is a real crucial turning point in terms of how civil guards related to the republic and to the population of Spain. So let's go into this. What occurred there and why did it have this dramatic effect that you're arguing?
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Foster Chamberlain
Yeah, this. This is a big one. So, yeah, probably the most important event in second republic prior to the outbreak of the civil war. So this was a time where there was a conservative republican government in power, and the socialists were afraid that that government was opening the door to a fascist takeover. You know, you had that in Austria in the very same year. So they launched this rebellion against the government in October 1934. But it really only takes off in Asturias in northern Spain, which is a coal mining region. And so these coal miners who are rebelling, of course, in every town, the Civil Guard post is going to be their primary target. Because the Civil Guard, not only are there those resentments, but the Civil Guard, they are the face of the state in these towns. And so you have a total of 111 civil guards who are killed throughout Spain in this uprising. So that's way more than had ever been been killed in any previous uprising. And so I actually dedicate two chapters to this rebellion, since it was so important. And in the first one, I look at those attacks, focusing on the primary mining region in Asturias and kind of the patterns of the way that both the miners and the Civil Guards behaved. And what you see is that honor really shaped what they were doing, that they felt an obligation to try and defend their hosts, even though there wasn't really any hope. In every case, they surrendered eventually. I mean, they were severely outnumbered. The miners had dynamite. But afterwards, some Civil Guards were tried by court martials if the military felt that they basically hadn't tried hard enough in terms of defending their posts. And so I think that kind of set a precedent that the Civil Guard comes to see itself less as an organization dedicated to civilian policing and winning the respect of the public, even if they didn't always receive it. That was the goal to one in which a confrontational relationship with the public was expected and where it was thought that they were essentially in a battle with the people that they were policing. And so then in the second chapter, I take a look at the repression of this rebellion after it was defeated. And naturally, the Civil Guard is also the one who, who leads this repression. They arrested 10,000 people in this effort and tortured many of them. So you see the parallels with what I mentioned that occurred in Barcelona in the 1890s. But in this case, the scale was much greater. And in this case, they were doing more than just investigating a crime. They were really trying to punish the working class population of an entire region. And so I argued that now it was really about revenge. They felt that the honor of their institution as a whole had been insulted as never before by this sort of full on assault on the Civil Guard in the province. And so now they were going to have their revenge. And so what you see here is this confrontational relationship with the working class really taking hold. And we also have to remember that prior to this, if you look at the Civil Guards professional journal, there were actually some guards that been thinking about how can we have more peaceful and non lethal policing, suggesting things like switching from carrying rifles to pistols or even batons, using technologies that were new at the time. Like tear gas for trout for crowd control. Now you see suggestions like that being dropped and instead they're talking about how can we fortify our stations, how can we arm ourselves with hand grenades and machine guns, et cetera. And so you really see them starting to think more about their relationship with the population as one of confrontation and even battle, rather than one in which they at least aspired to, you know, a respectful and a relationship of cooperation, let's say, in their policing duties.
- [34:57]
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- [35:27]
Reuben Silverman
Okay, so this does make a lot of sense, this ever growing use of torture, repression, sense of confrontation, desire for vengeance. This, I think leads right into my next question, which is once Franco's forces rebel and the civil war begins, you describe how the Civil Guard officers in the areas that Franco's rebels are taking control of, these Civil Guard officers, they're playing a very, very crucial role in further suppressing and exterminating people in the Spanish left. So. And actually supporters of the republic more generally, not just the left. Right. So what made the Guard so useful in this campaign? What were they doing and why were they so, I guess we could say good at doing it.
- [36:17]
Foster Chamberlain
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, first of all, yeah, I'm glad you used the word extermination because I think that's, that's appropriate. You know, sometimes the repression on the frankness side is called the politicide because the effort really was to kill anyone who, yeah, like you said, not only was associated with the left, you know, socialist communists, anarchists, but even the liberal Republican government. And so in that sense, the Francois where oppression was even, it was actually a lot bloodier than say the Nazis during the 1930s in terms of the targeting of political opponents. Of course, once you get to the Second World War, it's a different story. But prior to that, and I'm also glad you mentioned that's essentially the argument I try and make in the book, is that you do have this kind of acceleration, let's say, because in 1931, this sort of thing would have been unthinkable. And Civil Guards actually acquiesced to the coming of the Republic because they valued that political neutrality. And they, like I said, at least aspired to Having this working relationship with the people that they policed. But after October 1934, that was increasingly not the case. By July of 1936, when the Civil war breaks out, they already have this attitude of confrontation and kind of thought process that if, if we don't kill those leftists, you know, of various factions, then they're going to kill us. That was kind of the assumption. So it was partially about their own safety, you know, but also about this sense that Olsevin was going to kind of crumble under the mantle of communism if harsh and violent measures were not taken. They can see how extremely polarized the situation had become by that time and how the Civil Guards, they really dropped their commitment to political neutrality by the beginning of the civil war. Now, this isn't all of them, of course, and some of them did side with the Republicans, but I think if you look at the statistics, it seems likely that most of them, their sympathies were with the Francoist rebels, whether they initially joined that side or did so a little later on at the first available opportunity. So like you mentioned, yeah, they, they were one of, if not the most important force that Franco had for carrying out this rear guard repression along with the Carlist traditionalist militias and especially the Falanhi, the Spanish Fascist party. But these are militias, these are these sort of ragtag political groups, whereas the Civil Guard is a professional police force. So they were the ones with the know how, in terms of how to organize things with a military structure. But, and so they're working in these mixed units, especially with the phalanges in particular, which again, you know, prior to the civil war, they, they wouldn't have done that. They're not supposed to work with the political groups. But the situation had changed so much by that time, they were willing to do it. But the other advantage of the Civil Guard is that they are posted in towns all around the country, so they know the local area, they know who the leaders of leftist organizations are. And so that's why in many cases, in most, I would say more so the Civil Guard than any other group, you see them taking the lead in these mixed forces that are going out and carrying out these massacres, because they know how to organize them and they know who the people are that these groups need to target. And so the Civil Guard is actually, is absolutely crucial in that initial, very violent, but also chaotic phase of the Francois repression, especially in Andal? Sia, as Franco is making his way up from the south towards Madrid. But then even later in the war when the repression becomes more formalized with court martials and so on. The Civil Guard, you know, one of their duties is to serve these court orders and also to serve as a military police force. So you see them becoming very important throughout the war in terms of hunting down these people who were slated for execution by the Franco regime. And then of course, they're actually the most important force in terms of fighting the guerrilla groups that continue the fight against Franco even after the war itself ends in 1939. But that's getting beyond the scope of what's in the book.
- [41:14]
Reuben Silverman
Fair, fair. I mean, I think we've given a good sense of the overall book and its arguments. But I do want to ask one last question which is, and I don't want to be too presentist in asking this question, but I can't help but read the book and see the resonances between what you're writing about and just present day debates about policing and militarization of non military law enforcement organizations. So from your perspective, what are some of the general lessons that we can take from your studies on this subject?
- [41:50]
Foster Chamberlain
Yeah, yeah, thanks. That's something that naturally I think a lot about too. And yeah, I mean, obviously I'm not a scholar of the current situation of police organizations, but I think there are some general points that I can make. One is that people often mention this idea of militarization to me, because that's a debate that's going on right now here in the US but to me it's a little bit of a different thing than what we're talking about here. Because when I say militarization in this context, what I mean is that the Civil Guard has a military structure and it's under military discipline, which isn't really true of any police organization in the US except for the Coast Guard, which usually not the most controversial force here. So it's not actually the military structure itself that's the problem because you see many gendarmerie forces around the world that's quite common and a lot of them work perfectly well in a democratic society and are not necessarily that violent. So again, what is it that makes the Civil Guard different? I mean, in that time, of course, it's a lot different story now. Well, again, I think that you have to look at the organizational culture of that institution at that particular moment in time. That's really the key thing. And one thing I've emphasized is honor, but I think that too is a concept. You know, it's not necessarily bad if an organization has honor as one of its values. But what do they mean by honor? How is that interpreted? If you present honor as really meaning that relationship with the public and earning that respect in a peaceful way, then that can be a positive force. But when it becomes more a matter of confrontation, of kind of forcing the public to respect your organization, then that can have violent consequences. And I think that's what you see in the case of the Civil Guard in the Second Republic. And then of course, the other thing that we can, what people do usually mean about militarization, I think in the current debates in the US is more a question of equipment and tactics. And that is a factor that I think we see in the case of the Civil Guard and the Second Republic too, because remember, they're carrying these Mauser rifles, so a military rifle as their primary armament. And so if they are in a confrontational situation where they need to respond to protesters with force, then basically lethal force is their only option to open fire with those rifles. If they had had more non lethal methods at their disposal, then it might really have lessened the amount of violence that and the amount of deaths that the Civil Guard was causing in that period. Finally, I'll mention that for a long time there's been a lot of talk here in the US about community policing. And that's an idea that is very controversial within the sort of world of police culture. But to me, something along those lines does make a lot of sense because that is essentially what the Civil Guard, I think sort of needed to do in this period, but was unable to do that. They had to work within those structures of those rural communities. That sometimes even meant bending the rules a little bit, like maybe letting some peasants go and pick some acorns, even if it's a private property. If you get to know the culture of these local communities, then you can start to understand how you can work within that in a peaceful way. But instead, when you emphasize police isolation like the Civil Guards did, enforcing the letter of the law no matter what the circumstances, instead of adapting to those communities, that's when I think it's more likely that you'll wind up with violent confrontations. Now, of course, the concerns of people like Aomata that if you get too involved with the community, then you open the door for corruption and that sort of thing, I mean, those concerns are real. But I think that finding kind of a middle ground there is important. And lastly, I'll say that I think it's very important just for governments to think about these questions, even if the solutions are often very difficult to find. And that's because one of the things that struck me in my research, like I mentioned, is a lot of times these protests that became violent, the reason why people were protesting in the first place was because of police violence. So it creates this kind of vicious cycle. And I think that we've actually seen that same cycle here in the US in the past few decades. Whether you think about Rodney king in the 90s in LA, or you think about Ferguson, Missouri, or you think about George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movements, a lot of the biggest protests that we've seen in the US in recent decades have become, have been because of police violence. So if, if governments are concerned about maintaining order in their societies, then actually trying to reduce that violence is, I think, one of the number one ways that they can do that.
- [47:38]
Reuben Silverman
I like that. That's. That makes a lot of sense. The last thing I always ask with these interviews is I ask authors, your book is out now, it's published, it's in the world. Are you working on any new projects at the moment or are you just consumed with classes? If you could tell us that. It's always fun to hear.
- [47:58]
Foster Chamberlain
Sure, yeah. Well, mostly consumed with classes, but when I have the chance, I am working on a couple of other things. First of all, I'm working on an article. It's sort of a spinoff, some research that I did for that chapter about Barcelona that didn't make it into the book. And particularly what was interesting to me is that Barcelona wasn't the only place that experienced these anarchist attacks in the 1890s. Paris did as well. And yet in Paris you had a couple of these attacks and then it died out. Whereas in Spain they kept going, and they actually kept going into the 1910s as well. And then you had a series of other violent incidents in Barcelona. I mean, really, really all the way up until the Civil War, a very violent history in that city. And so what's the difference there? And I look at the police response of the police in Barcelona and Paris in those two cases to really see what the difference is and how that might have led to stabilization of the situation in Paris, but not in Barcelona. So I'm actually going to go to Paris for a week this summer to do some additional research in the archive of the Prefecture de Police for that article. But then more broadly, I'm just sort of pondering a second project. And one thing that really interested, because I also did quite a bit of work on the infantry academy, because that's where the Civil Guard officers were trained. And so I kind of got into the military culture of the army too, since that was influenced Civil Guard, although it wasn't exactly the same. So I'm interested in investigating that more. And particularly what strikes me is that there's an interesting book by Isabel Hull about German southwest Africa and how the military culture of the Germans may have influenced the genocide there, and even establish precedents that you can see back in Europe as well. I suspect that we might see similar patterns in the Spanish military as well, especially if you consider the way in which they behave, the tactics they developed in Cuba and Morocco, in particular, fighting insurrections there. And so I'd like to study that more and study how the military culture of the Spanish army at that time might have influenced the very brutal tactics that they used in those rebellions and also how those tactics were then taken up by other European powers in that period.
- [50:44]
Reuben Silverman
Well, those both sound like really interesting topics, so I look forward to reading them. But in the meantime, I would really encourage listeners to go out buying this book, read it, because it's a very. It's a very well written, really interesting book to read, and I. I think they'll enjoy it. I certainly did. So I want to thank you for taking the time to talk about it with me.
- [51:07]
Foster Chamberlain
All right. Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure, Ruben. Thanks a lot for talking with me. And thanks a lot for your interest in the work as well. Sa.