The Intellectual and Scientific Exile

On 22 February 1939, the poet Antonio Machado died in a pension in Colliure, France. He was 63 years old. Thus was the end of a painful exile that had started a month before when he left Barcelona with his family and a group of Friends that included the novelist Corpus Barga, the writer Carlos Riba, the philologist Tomás Navarro Tomás and the philosopher Joaquín Xirau. They were a few of the 450,000 people involved in the Retirada.

The Francoist regime continued persecuting Machado after his death. Not only did it order he be officially forgotten; it also removed him posthumously from the corps of high school teachers. The story of the poet, his memory during the regime, and his circle of companions in his final days summarize the fate of thousands of Spanish scientists and intellectuals following the Francoist victory in the Civil War.

The list of those exiles is a long one and includes the best names of the “second silver age” of Spanish culture that took shape during the Second Republic. Most would end up the the Americas, especially Mexico: Rafael Alberti, Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, Manuel Chaves Nogales, Luis Cernuda, Rosa Chacel, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Elena Fortún, María Lejárraga, Pedro Salinas, Ramón J. Sender, among others. There was also filmaker Luis Buñuel, philosopher Maria Zambrano, mathematician Julio Rey Pastor, historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, chemists Dorotea Barnés - shown here in a photograph from 1929 -and Pilar de Madariaga, physicist Blas Cabrera, pharmacologist Francisco Giral, aerospace scientist Emilio Herrera, and jurist Luis Jiménez de Asúa, who went to Argentina. In an irony of history, he taught the prosecutors who would later successfully prosecute the leaders of the Argentinian military dictatorships of the 1970s.

The most important permanent creation of this intellectual exile was the creation of the Colegio de México, the most elite institution of higher learning in that country and possibly all of Latin America, in October 1940.  The list of distinguished professors who taught there includes Carlos Bosh García, Óscar de Buen, Francisco Giral González, Juan Antonio Ortega y Medina, Wenceslao Roces, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and José Gaos.

The intellectual and scientific vacuum left by these exiles was enormous. The people who replaced them in the positions from which they were removed were often mediocrities whose greatest merit was their loyalty to the new regime. The dictatorship’s national Catholic ideology meant that Spain became disconnected from the intellectual development of the rest of the western world for decades, and Francoism’s miserly investment in research condemned the country to significant scientific backwardness. The underfunding of the school system, its classism and reactionary orientation further deepened what novelist Luís Martín-Santos called a “time of silence.”