Homage to Catalonia

Where 1984 Begins

George Orwell arrived in Barcelona in December 1936 as a journalist and left as something different: a person who had looked directly at the machinery of totalitarian propaganda and watched it operate in real time, on events he had personally witnessed. Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, is his account of what he saw. It is also, although this is easier to see in retrospect, the biographical source for nearly everything he subsequently wrote about politics — including both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The book describes Orwell’s time fighting with the POUM militia (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista — the independent Marxist party, affiliated with no international communist movement), the trenches outside Huesca in the winter cold, the extraordinary social experiment of revolutionary Barcelona, and then the May Days of 1937, when the Soviet-backed PSUC and the Spanish Republican government turned on their own left-wing allies and suppressed the revolution that had been fighting Franco alongside them.

Barcelona in 1936

The chapters describing Orwell’s first arrival in Barcelona in late 1936 are among the most striking he ever wrote, and not only because of his politics. What he found was a city in the grip of a genuine social revolution: churches burned, hotels collectivised, everyone addressing each other as “comrade,” the normal hierarchies of dress and deference suspended. Orwell, a committed democratic socialist but no ideologue, was moved by it in ways he was somewhat surprised to find himself moved. He was looking at something real — a society briefly organised on different principles — and he knew it while he was in it.

He was also aware, with characteristic honesty, that this was not the whole picture. The revolution had its ugliness, its fanaticism, its blind spots. Orwell never romanticised. But his account of what Barcelona felt like in those months before the suppression is one of the few contemporary descriptions of what a genuinely egalitarian social experiment looks and feels like from the inside, and it matters.

The Machinery of the Lie

What changed Orwell permanently was not the trenches, and not even being shot through the throat by a fascist sniper (which he describes with remarkable equanimity — he was more concerned about whether he would be able to speak again than about the fact of the bullet). What changed him was the May Days and their aftermath.

In May 1937, street fighting broke out in Barcelona between the PSUC-backed Assault Guards and the anarchist and POUM forces. Orwell found himself on a POUM rooftop watching the city he had arrived in three months earlier tear itself apart along political lines that had nothing to do with the war against Franco. When the fighting ended, the PSUC had won, and the suppression of the independent left began in earnest. The POUM was declared a fascist organisation — Trotskyist agents of Franco — and its members were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases murdered.

Orwell, by then back from the front, had to flee Spain to avoid arrest. But the detail that stayed with him, and that surfaces in Nineteen Eighty-Four with obsessive intensity, was something more specific: he watched the newspapers — including the left-wing British press — describe the Barcelona street fighting in terms that bore no relationship to what had happened. Events he had personally participated in were reported in ways that were not merely incomplete but factually inverted. This was not error or exaggeration. It was deliberate falsification, organised and systematic, in the service of a political line decided in Moscow.

The Source of Winston Smith

Orwell’s Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth altering historical records so that the Party’s past statements are always consistent with its present ones, is a direct descendant of what Orwell witnessed in Spain. The chilling insight of 1984 — that a totalitarian state does not merely control behaviour but actively rewrites the past, and that people will comply — is not an extrapolation from dystopian theory. It is what Orwell watched happen to the Spanish Civil War in real time, in publications he could read on the same day the events occurred.

Homage to Catalonia sold modestly on publication and went out of print. Orwell’s own publisher, Victor Gollancz, declined it because he found the anti-Stalinist politics uncomfortable. It did not find its proper audience until after 1984 made readers curious about where Orwell had come from. That history is itself something Orwell might have recognised: essential books, books that say unflattering things about powerful movements, have a way of being difficult to publish and slow to be acknowledged.

Read Homage to Catalonia before or after 1984. Either order works. What it will give you is something that 1984, by virtue of being a novel, cannot: the direct evidence of a specific, real political betrayal, described by a participant, with the particular authority of someone who was there and was honest enough to know he had been lied to.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the essential documents of the 20th century. The book that explains where Orwell’s convictions came from, and why they came from direct experience rather than theory.