Marching towards the Cruzada: Douglas Jerrold's road to nationalist Spain
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Date
2002
Authors
Hale, F.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State
Abstract
The Spanish Civil War pitted British Christians against each other in an intense
battle for the hearts and minds of the public. Generally speaking, Roman Catholics
in the United Kingdom favoured the insurgency of General Francisco Franco, who
promised to restore the disestablished Catholic Church to its perch of privilege from
which the socialist government had removed it and end the violent anticlericalism
which had ravaged religious personnel in Spain. Perhaps no English Catholic played
a more central role in the almost daily war of words in the secular and religious press
than Douglas Jerrold (1893-1964), a lay publicist, novelist, and amateur historian
whose Tory sentiments and disillusionment with liberal democracy and the course
of modern civilisation in general permeated his writing. In the present article,
which traces Jerrold’s political thought through his fictional and nonfictional work,
it is demonstrated that his advocacy of Franco’s Nationalist forces was not merely a
knee-jerk response to the anticlericalism of 1936 but virtually an inevitable consequence
of his commitment to what he termed the “Counter-Revolution” as a means
of restoring his vision of an earlier era.
Description
Keywords
Church History, Douglas Jerrold, Spanish Civil War
Citation
Hale, F. (2002). Marching towards the Cruzada: Douglas Jerrold's road to nationalist Spain. Acta Theologica, 22(2), 71-89.