The Black Order Brigade

Published four years after Franco’s death, the Phalanges de l’Ordre noir (The Black Order Brigade) is a graphic novel about a handful of Lincoln (XVth) Brigade veterans picking up arms again after a neofascist organization slaughtered the inhabitants of an Aragonese village. Written by Pierre Christin and illustrated Enki Bilal, the plot follows the commandos in their mostly vain attempts to prevent the Black Order from perpetrating a series of terrorist actions. The chase takes the former International Brigadiers throughout late-1970s Western Europe, thereby giving the authors the opportunity to take the pulse of the post-1968 New Left. On the one hand, the veterans are obsessed with settling scores with their enemies, whom they had already encountered during the Battle of Teruel –; on the other, their mission gradually becomes an embittering, deadly existential journey. 

At first glance, The Black Order Brigade only tangentially deals with the Spanish Civil War. There are no flashbacks to 1930s Spain, as the action takes place from January to late 1979. That said, the memory of the conflict looms large throughout the story, as an underlying thread showcases the disconnect between Old and New Lefts. This generational gap is most evident when the protagonists meet radical feminists, German Red Army Fraction members, and Swiss anarchists. It seems that the Civil War has become irrelevant to the post-1968 generation, and the commando resembles a relic of bygone days, with each character embodying the various ideologies involved in the International Brigades – Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, Christian democracy, labour Zionism, etc. 

That said, the graphic novel also emphasizes the continuities between the interwar years and 1970s Europe, especially when it comes to the deeply internationalist nature of the radical Left. Although the Lincoln Brigade was essentially English speaking, it did include battalions from other parts of the world. Thus, the group of veterans includes a Spanish priest, an American union shop steward, a British journalist, a French aristocrat, a female Polish writer, a Mossad agent, an Italian judge, a German professor, a Czech engineer and Communist Party dissident, and a Danish politician. As for the Black Order, it is made up of former Nationalist soldiers from all over Europe – former members of the Spanish Falange, the Condor Legion, the Belgian Rexist Party, and various French and Italian Fascist organizations. 

Although the authors do not have any expertise on the subject, The Black Order Brigade is a well-crafted, complex work that does not fall into the trap of idealizing the International Brigades and their legacy. In the minutes preceding the final shootout, the narrator bitterly opines that, come to think of it, this operation involved “horrible old men being watched by other, perhaps equally horrible, old men. There is no doubt the former deserved Hell, and there is no doubt we deserved it as much as they did” (78). Thus, this work is essentially dysphoric in that it mirrors the ideological hangover that plagued the socialist legacy from the 1950s onwards. 

AB-V