Free We Saw Spain Die by Preston Paul

in Villedieu sur Indre. He never really liked the area, writing jokily to Jay Allen: ‘You have missed nothing in not knowing this part of France. I would gladly participate in the next war against the peasants.’ 19 Some years later, in September 1970, they would move to the faded magnificence of the secluded Château de Roche, in Concrémiers near Le Blanc. He wrote to Jay Allen: ‘we have passed six months heroically trying to get this house in order. We are now in fair condition. Confusion reigns. Worrying about roofs, heating and WCs has impeded my work.’ 20 Finally, in the centre of the huge run-down château was a relatively modernized core, the equivalent of a four-bedroom house, where they lived. On the third floor and the other wings lived the books and the bats.
    Once established at Puy, he began to publish the series of books that obliged the Franco regime to change its falsified version of its own past. The most celebrated was the first,
The Myth of Franco’s Crusade,
the devastating exposé of right-wing propaganda about the Spanish Civil War. 21 By putting up the money for Ruedo Ibérico, to publish it, he inadvertently saved the house from financial collapse. In fact, because the French printer had little experience of typesetting in Spanish, the first edition contained so many errors that it had to be pulped. 22 Nevertheless, it appeared in 1963 and a year later in a much expanded French edition, it was decisive in persuading Manuel Fraga to set up the department solely dedicated to the modernization of regime historiography. Its director, Ricardo de la Cierva, in a losing battle with Southworth, went on to write over one hundred books in defence of the Franco regime. This feat was achieved by dint of having the resources of the Ministry of Information at his disposal until the death of Franco, and by a lack of inhibition about self-repetition. Jay Allen sent a copy of
El mito
to Louis Fischer, describing the book as ‘an extremely detailed and able job’. Aware that Herbert was facing significant financial problems, Jay asked Louis in his capacity as a distinguished professor in Princeton if he could use his influence to persuade the university to acquire the Southworth collection ‘and Fritz along with it’.
    In 1967, Southworth wrote a second book,
Antifalange,
also published by Ruedo Ibérico, a massively erudite commentary on the process whereby Franco converted the Falange into the single party of his regime. It had significantly less commercial impact than
El mito,
because it was a minutely detailed line-by-line commentary on a book by a Falangist writer, Maximiano García Venero,
Falange en la guerra deEspaña: la Unificación y Hedilla.
García Venero was the ghost-writer for the wartime Falangist leader, Manuel Hedilla, who had opposed Franco’s take-over of the single party in April 1937. 23 Having been condemned to years of imprisonment, internal exile and penury, Hedilla saw the book as an attempt to revindicate his role in the war. José Martínez, the director of Ruedo Ibérico, asked Herbert to provide detailed notes expanding on the things that García Venero had chosen not to say about Falangist violence. Given his exhaustive knowledge of the Falange, those notes eventually grew to a scale that required their publication in an accompanying volume. Meanwhile, Manuel Fraga had become aware of the imminent publication, and had ensured that the Spanish Embassy in Paris put pressure on García Venero to prevent publication and indeed cause fatal damage to Ruedo Ibérico. Since the enormous book had already been typeset at great expense, José Martínez refused and, after labyrinthine legal complications, the two books were released. 24 Southworth’s devastating demolition of García Venero’s text revealed such knowledge of the interstices of the Falange that it provoked considerable surprise and admiration among many senior Falangists. As a result of his prior research for his