The Maquis (; ; also spelled maqui) were Spanish guerrillas who waged irregular warfare against the Francoist dictatorship within Spain following the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War until the early 1960s, carrying out sabotage, robberies, and assassinations of alleged Francoists as well as contributing to the fight against Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime in France during World War II. They also participated in occupations of the Spanish embassy in France.
Maquis activity in Spain peaked towards 1946, after which the resistance fighters were heavily repressed during the (1947–1949), in which instances of White Terror such as summary execution (paseos) and application of the Ley de Fugas (extralegal executions predicated on detainees' actual or supposed attempts to escape custody) took a heavy toll among maquis combatants and their supporters. Following its decline, maquis activity fully disappeared in the 1960s.
Overview Referring to the contribution of the Spanish Maquis to the French resistance movement, Martha Gellhorn wrote in The Undefeated (1945):
Also during World War II, Spaniards were involved in the assassination of Julius Ritter, an SS colonel in charge of recruiting forced labor, as well as in the planned assassination of General Ernst Schaumburg. In October 1944 a group of 6,000 maquis, including Antonio Téllez Solà, invaded Spain via the Aran Valley but were driven back after ten days. Few details of the maquis' actions in Spain have been made public because of the secrecy of the Franco government, but guerrillas, including Francesc Sabaté Llopart, Jose Castro Veiga, and Ramon Vila Capdevila were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) officers, and uncountable acts of industrial sabotage. Between 1943 and 1952, the Civil Guard reportedly arrested 2,166 maquis, nearly wiping out the movement.
Etymology
The term maquis comes from the French term maquis, which in turn comes from the Corsican term macchia, the maquis shrubland, a type of biome found in the Mediterranean basin, mostly associated with Corsica.
In France, the term was first used to refer to a group of guerrillas of the French resistance against the German occupation of France during World War II. The resistance fighters in these encampments were referred to as maquisards.
History The so-called (Spanish for "those who've fled" or "fugitives") originated in 1936 when many people fled from the Rebel (franquista) faction to the mountains after becoming isolated in places like Asturias, León, Galicia, Extremadura, and the province of Huelva. Rebels rapidly annihilated those in Extremadura and Huelva, with only those in the north of the country managing to survive past the war.
The outbreak of World War II so soon after the civil war was a surprise to Spanish Republican exiles in France; many of them joined the French Resistance. In 1944, when German forces retreated, many of the guerrillas returned to fight in Spain. Despite the failure of the invasion of the Val d'Arán that year, some columns continued to progress into the Spanish interior and to connect with the groups that had remained in the mountains since 1939.
The apogee of guerrilla action was between 1945 and 1947. After this, Franco government repression intensified, destroying the groups one by one. Many members were killed or incarcerated, while others escaped to France or Morocco. In 1952, the last important contingents evacuated from Spain. After that, those who resisted in the forested and mountainous regions, refusing to choose either exile or surrender, fought only for their own survival.
Beginnings The origins of the maquis in Spain lie with those who fled the advancing forces of Franco's Nationalists. The insecurity engendered by the repressive tactics of the Nationalist insurgency turned their political opponents—even many who were not politically active but simply known to sympathize with the republic—into fugitives. At first many hid in relatives' homes, but some sought refuge in the mountains. Their numbers were enhanced by deserters and by escapees from prisons and concentration camps. These people constituted the nucleus of those who decided to keep fighting from the forests and mountains.
The political character of the guerrillas was as varied as that of the Popular Front, containing communists, socialists, and anarchists. Despite the diverse ideologies, due to the organizational persistence of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) until 1948, the Communists dominated the other currents.
XIV Cuerpo de Ejército During the war, the idea of the possibility of a guerrilla war at the rearguard of Franco's Nationalists was proposed. The idea came to fruition at the initiative of Juan Negrín, at the time head of the Republican government and of the Ministry of Defense. He created the (Guerrilla Army Corps) in October 1937. This name was used for the Basque section of the Spanish Republican Army until the collapse of the northern front.
The short-term objectives of this Corps were the interruption of the communications and supply lines to the Nationalist troops, and the carrying out of special operations. In the long term, they were to continue the war against Franco in the case of defeat on the conventional fronts.
At the end of the war, such activities had been set in motion on the fronts of Teruel, Andalusia, Extremadura, and Toledo. The action with the greatest significance was the liberation, on 23 May 1938, of 300 Asturian political prisoners in Granada. Throughout 1938 and 1939 the Corps brought together many of the exiles of Andalucía and Extremadura; however, the Republican defeat brought the dissolution of the Corps.
Retreat: the French camps Hundreds of thousands of Republican soldiers and civilians crossed the French border ahead of the advancing Nationalist troops in Catalonia. Once on the other side, authorities put them in concentration camps. There were 22 camps in total: seventeen in Metropolitan France (Barcarès, Agde, Saint-Cyprien, Argelès-sur-Mer, Berck-Plage, Montpellier Chapallete, Fort Mahon Plage, Tour de Carol, Septfonds, Baste-les-Foages, Bram, Haros, Gurs, Vernet d'Ariège, Rivesaltes, Fort Colliure, and Rieucros) and five in French North Africa (Camp Morand, Meridja, Djelfa, Hadjerat-OM'Guil, and Ain-el-Curak). In these camps, exiles began to reorganize themselves into guerrilla groups.
In the camp of Argelès-sur-Mer a series of meetings were held. Members of the PCE and the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Unified Socialist Youth) participated. In October 1940, the decision was made to organize anti-fascist actions in France, together with the French resistance, against the Vichy government. This was the beginning of the Spanish involvement on a grand scale in the fight against the occupation of France.
Resistance On 11 October 1940 the Vichy regime started the Companies of Foreign Workers (Compagnies de Travailleurs Etrangers, CTE), which permitted prisoners to leave the concentration camps to work in factories. This increased the possibilities of escape. Shortly afterwards, the Vichy regime established the Obligatory Work Service (Service du travail obligatoire, STO) for French citizens, with similar objectives: to provide manual labor to armament factories and the construction of the Atlantic Wall.
Those French who were released through the STO began to escape to the forests and mountains, where they came together with Spanish who escaped from the CTE. The French escapees were mainly civilians, rather than remnants of the defeated French army. From this time, the French term "maquis" began to be used to refer to the camps, and "maquisards" for the people who occupied them.
Formation of the AGE Some Spanish refugees joined French resistance groups, while others formed autonomous groups. In April 1942 a meeting of several Spanish combat groups decided to take the name of the XIV Cuerpo del Ejército de Guerrilleros Españoles, considering themselves the Corps' successors.
In May 1944 the XIV Corps re-formed as the Agrupación de Guerrilleros Españoles (AGE, roughly 'Spanish Guerrilla Group'), because they consisted for the most part of Spanish combatants on French soil. This conveyed the group's distancing from the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), the armed branch of the French Communist Party, with whom they had previously worked closely. By this time, the Spanish resistors had participated in numerous armed actions against the German army, even liberating various populations in southern France.
Sources vary quite a bit concerning the numbers of Spanish combatants in the ranks of the Resistance, but in general they accept a number around 10,000.Serrano, Secundino (2001). Maquis. Historia de la guerrilla antifranquista. Editorial Temas de Hoy, Madrid. After the German army was driven from France, Spanish maquis returned their focus to Spain.
Invasion of Val d'Aran
The most notable operation of the Spanish maquis was the invasion of Spain by between 4,000Carr, Raymond (2003). España 1808-1975. Ariel Historia, Barcelona. , "El PCE organizó entonces a 4.000 voluntarios para invadir España a través de los Pirineos," that is, "The PCE then organized about 4,000 volunteers to invade Spain by way of the Pyrenees.": "En total, de los 13.000 españoles que estaban en el maquis francés, unos 4000 se alistaron." ("In total, of the 13,000 Spanish that were with the French maquis, some 4,000 were listed.") and 7,000 guerrillas through Val d'Aran and other parts of the Pyrenees, well equipped and with heavy weapons, on October 19, 1944, after the German Army had been driven from the south of France. The invasion was named 'Operation Reconquest of Spain'.
Operation Reconquest of Spain was planned by the AGE staff. To carry out the invasion they created the 204th Division, made up of 12 brigades. The division was commanded by Vicente López Tovar.
The objective of the offensive was to retake the sector of Spanish territory comprising the land between the French border and the Cinca and Segre rivers. Later, the zone was declared conquered by the Spanish Republican government in exile, with the intention of provoking a general uprising against Franco throughout Spain. It was hoped that this would force the Allies to "liberate" Spain the same way it was "liberating" the rest of Europe.
The main attack in the valley was preceded by operations in other valleys of the Pyrenees during the previous weeks, with the objective of distracting Franco's forces, evaluating the situation in the interior of Spain, and contacting other groups of exiles. The most important points of penetration in the long chain of mountains were Roncesvalles, Roncal, Hecho, Canfranc, Val d'Aran, Andorra, and Cerdanya, though there were also operations at smaller points.
The guerrilla army conquered various towns and villages, raising the Spanish Republican flag, carrying out anti-Franco meetings in the plazas, as well as controlling part of the French border for several days, through which they were able to bring in trucks, materials, and reinforcements from France. However, the invasion failed to take Vielha e Mijaran, its principal objective.
In response, Franco moved into the area a great force consisting of Civil Guard, Armed Police Corps, battalions of the Spanish Army, and 40,000 Moroccan (Army of Africa) troops, which repelled the offensives. Overwhelmed by the Nationalists' numerical and material advantage, the guerrillas pulled back. The retreat ended 28 October, when the last guerrillas re-crossed the border back into France, without the hoped-for uprising.