Words and using them to resist dictatorship

It’s the murders, the tortures, the imprisonments we mainly think of when it comes to dictatorships. There is, however, another form of oppression which is less dramatic but more pervasive. That’s the suffocation across every area of society, of all independent or creative thought.

It takes a special kind of person to find a way to resist it.

María Moliner was born in Spain in 1900. She became, more by force of circumstance than by deliberate choice, an archivist and librarian in the 1920s. That gave her an excellent platform to work on ideas learned from a progressive schooling as a child, to contribute to the spread of education and, in particular, the written word throughout her country.

Her career peaked in some significant national appointments, under the Second Spanish Republic in the 1930s. It was during this period that she worked on building a nationwide network of libraries, and summed up her philosophy in a set of instructions to librarians. While long-established libraries are easy to run, much more commitment is needed to launch new ones: 

That will not be possible without enthusiasm, and enthusiasm requires faith. The librarian, to inject enthusiasm into the task, has to believe in two things: in the capacity for improvement of the people the librarian is serving, and that the library’s mission can effectively assist that improvement.

She claimed that people sense their need for culture, because “there is no authentic liberation” without culture, and they feel:

… that the culture denied to them is another privilege conferred on certain persons with no inherently superior value… merely through society’s consideration, their economic position, etc. 

These were exciting times, for those who wanted to see education drive back the limits of ignorance and literacy growing to widen access to culture. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. A group of senior military officers rose against the Republic, backed by just the kind of privileged individuals who enjoyed exclusive access to culture (whether or not they’d taken advantage of it). In 1939, after  a three-year civil war, won with the backing of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, one of those officers established a new dictatorship across Spain.

His name was Francisco Franco, and his harsh rule would last until his death in 1975.

His first step was to purge the country of all supporters of the previous regime. For a large minority, that meant physical elimination. Some 200,000 people may have died at the hands of the Franco regime. Half a million escaped abroad but some later returned, in many cases to a reception far less humane than the regime had promised. In addition, there were more than quarter of a million political prisoners, some only released on Franco’s death.

But there were also less extreme forms of purging. Moliner lost her multiple senior jobs, and before she could even return to her original posting as an archivist with the tax service, she was subjected to repeated interrogations. She’d had glowing reports from her superiors under the Republic. Did that make her a sympathiser, a ‘red’? She had not only to answer the accusations but find references from people of standing, to back up her claims, such as that the congratulations she’d received were for her professional performance, not her political sympathies. She had, indeed, protected many right wingers from persecution by the more extreme left-wing elements that came to power towards the end of the Republic.

Ultimately, she avoided arrest or imprisonment, but she knew her career was irretrievably damaged: she would always be marked down as ‘red’, so senior appointments would be out of the question, and national roles unthinkable.

Indeed, she was demoted eighteen points on her profession’s scale of seniority, and was eventually given charge of the small library of an industrial engineering college in Madrid, with no other staff and a minuscule budget for the purchase of books. Any hope of helping to advance an ambitious national plan for education was, of course, gone for good. 

This is where Moliner showed her real strength of personality. Inmaculada de la Fuente recently published a biography of Moliner, entitled Exilio Interior, internal exile (sadly, I know of no English-language edition). That’s where her subject went. Not into physical exile. She was, after all, living and working in the national capital. No, the exile was metaphorical. She turned inwards for resources, and found plenty. None were so plentiful as the raw materials used by this champion of education and the written page: words, words, words.

María Moliner working on her dictionary

She spent fifteen years putting together a dictionary of Spanish. She drew, naturally, on the prestigious work already carried out by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). But hers was a fresh approach. She produced a Dictionary of Spanish Usage, based on the true, living use of the best Spanish.

It was received with great enthusiasm. It became the essential reference work for anyone writing in Spanish or using the language as a tool of their trade. The Nobel-prize winning novelist Gabriel García Marquez (he of A Hundred Years of Solitude) said it was “twice the length” of the RAE’s dictionary, and “in my judgement – more than twice as good.” 

That led to her name being put forward for election to the RAE when a vacancy opened up.

That was an exciting moment. Franco, though close to death, was still in power. Until 1975, a married woman in Spain still needed her husband’s permission to sign an employment contract. And yet here was a woman in serious contention for a seat in the country’s most prestigious Academy. 

But, you’ll have guessed, it didn’t happen. The seat went to a man. A deserving nominee, but no break with the past. As Moliner’s biographer puts it, “the lexicographer wasn’t proposed as a woman, but as the author of the Dictionary of Spanish Usage. But for being a woman (or for not being a man), she was denied.”

Or as the (female) columnist Josefina Carabias exclaimed, “… had María Moliner been a man, she would have been in the Academy for quite some time.”

So Moliner remained in her internal exile. Which soon closed in still further, as Alzheimer’s hit her. She had no second chance to try for a seat in the Academy. She never knew that Franco had died. She missed out on Spain returning to the democracy that he’d overthrown.

María Moliner’s monument:
her Dictionary of Spanish Usage

But she left a remarkable monument all the same. A tool still widely respected today: the latest edition was issued in 2016. A significant contribution to that task she set herself in the 30s, to advance the cause of access to culture.

Because culture makes one free. A message that needs to be shouted again and again from the rooftops in our day, when so many seem to lack the understanding to stand up for their own rights rather than back the privileges of an elite in no way morally superior to them. A message you can count on the little dictators, like Franco, doing their best to crush to death. 

While people like Moliner find ways to advance the cause despite them.