A documentary discovery reveals that Juan Negrín coordinated republican propaganda in the Civil War

The historian Francisco Sevillano finds in the Negrín Archive never-before-seen documentation on the organization of the war propaganda on the republican side which reveals the importance that Negrín gave to him as president of the Council of Ministers.

“From 37, Negrin assumes direct control of war propaganda through the press office, this is new, it was not known and I found it here,” says the researcher after visiting the Negrín Archive, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

He is also a professor of Contemporary History at the University of Alicante and has studied political propaganda during the Spanish War since he began as a researcher with his doctoral thesis.

First he dedicated his efforts to the rebel side, and later, already immersed in the professorship project, he decided to expand the focus to the Republican side. He is currently preparing a monograph on this subject.

With this objective he sought information in different archives in peninsular Spain, among which he mentions the contemporary collection of the National Historical Archive, the Military Archive of Ávila, the Documentary Center of Historical Memory of Salamanca, the archive of Euskadi and that of Catalonia. “This pilgrimage gave me a lot of information but there were important gaps,” he points out.

The gaps that the professor speaks of refer to the Ministry of Propaganda that was created in 1936 – with Carlos Esplá from Alicante as head -, and remained as such until 37 when it was extinguished due to lack of means; and above all to the Undersecretariat of Propaganda, which existed during the two Negrín governments.

From the information found in the Negrín Archive, Sevillano also highlights “a very little-known aspect” about the role played by the press office that depended on the President of the Government. “Negrín turns it into a propaganda office under his direct control. With reports every few days, it is reorienting the propaganda, including that of the Undersecretariat (which still exists). The press office no longer only issues information about the foreign and national press, but it is also a propaganda office that gives slogans, that establishes projects, that gives guidelines for certain celebrations, especially in ’38.

The President of the Government is concerned about international public opinion, especially that of France, Great Britain and the United States, the great powers, because he still hopes to be able to influence it and put it in favor of the republican cause. In the documents consulted in the Negrín Archive, Professor Sevillano has found balances on the work being carried out, where it is confirmed that foreign propaganda is deficient and the Undersecretariat is ineffective.

Also details about the precarious means they suffer. Benigno Rodríguez, Negrín’s personal secretary, says that they only have one typewriter. “He says that it works poorly and that he brought it from his house; We are talking about the Head of Government, which at that time is in Barcelona.”

The Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1937, in which the Presidency of the Government is decisively involved through the financing of the Spanish pavilion, where, among other contents, the “Guernica”, which Picasso finished, is shown to the world for the first time. to paint on behalf of the government itself. Immediately after Paris, a new committee was created to prepare for the 1939 New York World’s Fair with the same objective, but the end of the war also frustrated this hope.

Francisco Sevillano decided to travel to Gran Canaria after consulting the Negrín Archive catalog that appears on the Juan Negrín Foundation website, which allowed him to hope that the information he was looking for could be found here. “I came with doubts, I thought: ‘at least I will enjoy the city and the island’, but I have been busy every morning because there is a volume of important information. “I have been surprised by the quality of the information and the quantity, and they have told me that more things can be opened.”