A People Betrayed

A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain

By: Paul Preston

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Whereas so many 20th-century Spanish histories begin with Franco and the devastating Civil War, Paul Preston's magisterial work begins in the late 19th century with Spain's collapse as a global power, especially reflected in its humiliating defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States and its loss of colonial territory.

With astonishing detail, Preston later describes the ravages that rent Spain in half between 1936 and 1939. Tracing the frightening rise of Francisco Franco, Preston recounts how Franco grew into Spain's most powerful military leader during the Civil War and how, after the war, he became a fascistic dictator who not only terrorized the Spanish population through systematic oppression and murder, but also enriched corrupt officials who profited from severe economic plunder of Spain's working class.

The dictatorship lasted through World War II - during which Spain sided with Mussolini and Hitler - and only ended decades later, in 1975, when Franco's death was followed by a painful yet bloodless transition to republican democracy. Yet, as Preston reveals, corruption and political incompetence continued to have a corrosive effect on social cohesion into the 21st century, as economic crises, Catalan independence struggles, and financial scandals persist in dividing the country.

©2020 Paul Preston (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

superb account of over a 100 years of Spanish history

This was wonderful eye-opening book about corruption and how the political class in Spain has failed the people it is supposed to serve. Although the narrator is excellent, his pronunciation of the name of Spanish cities and regions is atrocious.

“However….”

Lots of details of Spain’s tortured modern political experience are explained and explored about as thoroughly as a book covering the span of time it does. It is an engaging tale up until about the time the Chevy Chase updates on SNL would have been airing.

The performance is lovely although some pronunciations are somewhat British (think of the way Lord Byron would have pronounced “Juan”) though not consistently so. That’s annoying at times. It’s not as annoying as the ubiquitousness of the word “however”.

The history here seems to constantly happen despite whatever contemporaneous indications would seem to predict. The national anthem of Spain as presented here ought to be “On the Other Hand”. If listeners to the performance were to engage in taking a shot of liquor every time “however” is pronounced then they would run through a case of booze well before the end of the performance. Talk about needing a siesta! Geez!

Important history not told well

The book contains a story that we should hear, but unfortunately the author is not the one to tell it. It is filled with irrelevant detail and obscure players making the book much longer than it needed to be and difficult to follow.

"A People Lectured" Paul Preston’s Long March Through Liberal Despair

Paul Preston’s A People Betrayed is a formidable monument to moral outrage, but less a history than a 36-hour ethics class disguised as a political narrative. Under the guise of chronicling corruption and cruelty in modern Spain, Preston delivers a relentless catalogue of elite misdeeds, repression, and institutional collapse. One waits for structural analysis, but instead receives a sermon. One hopes for dialectic, but finds only diatribe.

The core idea, that Spain’s modern tragedy is rooted in a parasitic, self-serving elite, is hardly new. What frustrates is how Preston treats this as a settled fact, not a hypothesis to interrogate. The reader is left trudging through episode after episode of familiar moral failures, but without the connective tissue of explanation. The villains are too easy. The mechanisms too fuzzy. The outcomes too inevitable. There is little sense of contingency, or why the republic’s collapse wasn’t foreordained.

Worse, Preston seems to lack curiosity