Priests and anarchists against prostitution: paid sex during the Civil War

"But the chalet is there. We knock, they open it, and they laugh when they see us. How nice the light and the warmth and the two girls are to us. I wait for Agustín to disappear with one, and I silently invite him to the other. I don't care. She's as dark as the road we came on." "Is your name?"

— Carmela . And you?

The rain will sound across the countryside. There will be prayers, relays, ice, anguish. Comrades will die. Inside, the enticing atmosphere suffocates. I feel heat, an indefinable heat, a powerful heat that nothing can resist. It's coming closer. How foolish you are! She's naked; I dare not say naked, as one says of the truth. Surely saying so would be a sin . I hold her in my arms and her eyes go out. I believe it. — Civilization has reached our lower abdomen .

This is how the Falangist writer Rafael García Serrano described the dalliances with prostitutes in a Nationalist platoon during the Civil War in his famous work , *La fiel cunada* (The Faithful Infantry) (1943). Awarded the National Literature Prize , it was made into a successful film the following year. Less well known, however, is that the novel itself was withdrawn from the market a few months after its publication and wouldn't return to bookstores until 15 years later.

The references to paid sex were unacceptable to the National Catholic regime, especially in a work that otherwise glorified military life during the war. Thus, the Archbishop of Toledo angrily protested through a decree in which he noted: " The sins of lust in youth are proposed as necessary and inevitable (pp. 195 and 302)" and "The novel repeatedly describes crudely and indecorously scenes from cabarets and brothels (pages 65-66 and 134-135)," among other criticisms, which caused the Vice-Secretary of Popular Education to withdraw the remaining copies of the edition.

This was no small matter, given that the issue of women's virtue and the moral question of prostitution had become yet another of the battlegrounds between both sides during the Civil War. But as expected, prostitution was not strictly a matter of reds or nationals, but of both, as Fernando Ballano Gonzalo points out in the recently published Love and sex in the Civil War (Arzalia): “Although the rebels and their priests, on the one hand, and the anarchists, on the other, tried to put an end to prostitution, not only did they fail, but it actually grew dramatically . First, because of the large concentrations of single men; second, because many didn't know if they would be alive any time soon and wanted to make the most of it; and third, many women had to find a way to make a living . The fact is that prostitution grew considerably, sometimes even close to the front.”

The attacks between both sides in this regard were furious, among the most notable was, for example, the accusation that the numerous female militiamen who had gone to fight on the front lines in Somosierra against the rebels in the early days of the war were, in fact, prostitutes, shattering the image of female fighters on the front lines side by side with their male comrades. The issue received great attention in both the Republican and national press, as explained by historian Mary Nash in Rojas. The Republicans in the Civil War , which Ballano mentions and which was decisive for them to return from the front, under the premises that they spread venereal diseases as well as dragging “the young and innocent soldiers of the revolution into a degenerate sexual immorality ”, as published in a socialist newspaper in March 1937.

Mary Nash herself explained the issue of female militiawomen: "It is impossible to estimate the number of prostitutes there were on the front lines. Of course, not all militiawomen were prostitutes; read the memoirs of the woman from Extremadura and others... but to deny that an indeterminate number of prostitutes joined the columns hoping to spend with them, at five pesetas per service , the ten pesetas a day, free of charge, that the militiamen earned is an unquestionable truth, as is the need to expel them from the front. Let's be honest, most of the militiawomen did not have to be expelled; they left when autumn and the cold began, just as it must be acknowledged that some, very few, resisted leaving the front despite the inconveniences," writes Mary Nash in Rojas: Republican Women in the Civil War .

The reality of the war undoubtedly complicated the issue of prostitution, which had been discussed at length, especially since the Second Republic , with the abolitionist speeches of Clara Campoamor , Rico Avello, Cesar Juarrós and Sánchez Covisa during the debate of January 1932, to force the Government to commit to abolishing the 1847 regulation of prostitution as quickly as possible, according to the study by Mercedes Riva Arjona entitled The Second Spanish Republic and Prostitution: The Road to Approval of the Abolitionist Decree of 1935. It was considered that this regulation in fact protected the activity and was incompatible with human dignity.

There has been a tendency to link this abolitionism with the republican left, but the truth is that the decree that would repeal the old norm of 1847 would not be approved until 1935 and would do so during the right-wing biennium, by the hand of the Minister of Labor, Health, and Social Assistance, Federico Salmón Amorín , member of the CEDA – Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights –, who would be assassinated in Paracuellos in November 1936 during the Red Terror .

Although Fernando Ballano does not expressly mention the issue of Salmón Amorín, his study focuses precisely on separating the fact of the right and left on the issue of paid sex, especially during the Civil War, by specifying that it was allowed in both territories , for which he presents good examples of this, such as the numerous texts of war correspondents in the legendary Hotel Florida in Republican Madrid, both by Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos .

“The shells keep falling. The hotel, usually so quiet at this hour, is today filled with bustle and confusion. Doors leading to balconies around the glass well are opening everywhere. Men and women in various states of undress are sneaking out of the front rooms, dragging suitcases and mattresses into the back rooms. There is a waiter from the restaurant, a curly-haired man, who emerges successively from different doors with his arm around different young women who are whimpering or giggling nervously. Magnificent displays of underwear and disheveled people,” wrote Dos Passos in Interwar travels .

The same thing happened on the rebel side: “The military was very formalistic and very order-oriented, but the intelligent ones understood that there had to be safety valves so the pot wouldn't explode ... The Catholic Church in general, and many military chaplains in particular, were not very in agreement with the sexual permissiveness of the military , and clashes occurred with them.” Thus, the chaos of the war did not particularly distinguish any side, whether due to the moral censure of the Catholic Church on the Nationalist side of the activity or that of feminist anarchism on the Republican side with measures such as the "Prostitution Liberation Centers" promoted by the Mujeres Libres association, which sought to provide decent work and care for prostitutes and which had little effect, according to the association itself: "One day we launched our idea of the Prostitution Liberation Centers, not as a solution to the problem, but as a palliative for one of its most serious manifestations. The continuation of the war and the revolutionary process have reduced the value of our initiative and have turned us into meditative spectators of events."

Ballano also expressly notes the abolitionist, rather than prohibitionist, nature of the 1935 decree, since it was not punishable by any type of crime in the penal code, except perhaps that of pimping: “It is said that the practice of prostitution “is not recognized in Spain as of this Decree as a lawful means of livelihood.” If it is not lawful, it is assumed to be unlawful, but this unlawfulness and the corresponding penalties are not established, so it simply becomes something illegal, that is, unregulated. Let us remember that what was punishable, by the Law of Vagrants and Hooligans , promulgated by Azaña on August 5, 1933, in its article 2.2, was the conduct of “ruffians and pimps,” who were punished with “internment in a work establishment or agricultural colony.” Franco maintained the law and the only thing he did was modify Article 2.2 on July 15, 1954, whose title was as follows: "Homosexuals, ruffians and pimps."

In fact, as Mercedes Riva Arjona points out, there were abolitionist-prohibitionist aspects in the 1935 decree, stating that "the practice of prostitution is not recognized in Spain as a lawful means of livelihood as of this decree" and prohibiting "all kinds of advertising that, in a more or less covert manner, tends to favor the sexual trade," but it also maintained a spirit of regulation , because it empowered the authorities to monitor people diagnosed with venereal diseases associated with prostitution, as well as their compulsory treatment and forced hospitalization.

The truth is that at the end of the Civil War, shortly before La fiel cunanda (1943) was published and censored, the Franco regime had returned to a system of regulation of prostitution with the decree of 1941, which allowed it as long as it was in closed premises , at the same time that it re-established the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer, in which some very similar aims were established to those indicated in the Decree of 11 September 1931 of the Second Republic, according to Elisabet Velo i Fabregat in Prostitution under the Franco dictatorship . The system that had prevailed until 1935 was practically restored, and it would not be definitively changed until the 1956 law, also under Franco's rule, which effectively prohibited prostitution.