THE Spanish aristocrat turned militant communist Constancia de la Mora was not only a fascinating heroic historical figure but someone whose life and experience provides valuable lessons for us today.

Born in 1906 into a wealthy family, she grew up in pre-republican Spain under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Her grandfather had been a five-term prime minister. She enjoyed all the privileges of her class. But the world she experienced was also one of ossified class structures, deeply conservative and misogynist, under the oppressive hegemony of a fundamentalist Catholic Church.

As a young adult, she came to reject this and became an avid Republican and early feminist. She was the first woman in Republican Spain to obtain a divorce simply on the basis of her own volition and remarry, this time a communist. From then on, she would devote all her energies to supporting and defending the Republic in which she placed all her hopes.

Her husband, Hidalgo de Cisneros, was a dashing Spanish military officer and aviator who became aviation commander under the Republic.

Between 1933 and 1935 he was stationed in Rome and Berlin as the Republic’s aviation attaché. At the outbreak of the civil war, he, together with Nunez del Prado, head of Aeronautics, enabled a large part of the air force to remain in Republican hands.

In her autobiography, In Place of Splendour, de la Mora gives a riveting account of her upbringing and her role in the struggle to defend the Spanish Republic from the fascists. There have been numerous accounts about the International Brigades and academic tomes about the civil war itself but very little from someone at the heart of the Republican government.

Her narrative is not a straightforward autobiography but a valuable historical lesson very much for us still today, about the difficulties of trying to change an entrenched, archaic system.

De la Mora provides an almost day-by-day narrative of events both before the fascist coup and its aftermath but from the viewpoint of someone with ready access to those in power as well as with ordinary citizens on the streets.

She depicts in graphic detail the equivocation and pusillanimity demonstrated by those first Republican governments, made up as they were of a loose coalition of anti-monarchists, centrists, liberals and social democrats.

She and her husband were mortified at the way leading government figures simply allowed most of the old power structures, including that of the all-powerful and reactionary Catholic Church, to remain in place.

The government also remained impotent as the fascists openly mobilised and prepared their coup. The fascists’ political arm, the Falange, was also allowed to create mayhem on the streets with impunity, with random shootings and violence to spread fear.

She describes the terror perpetrated by the fascists, thanks to the aid they got from Mussolini and Hitler as well as the “non-intervention” tactics of the British and French which together doomed the Republic.

The government insisted on sticking to the letter of legality and democratic norms, arguing that without concrete evidence they could not move against the fascists or the wealthy elite, thus leaving them free to fight the legitimate government with any means at their disposal, legal and illegal.

Given the macho society pertaining in Spain at the time, de la Mora, like many other women, was not considered capable of taking on highly responsible jobs. Despite her forceful efforts to serve the Republican government, she was rebuffed. But she managed, eventually, to find her niche by taking on the care of some of the thousands of orphans who previously had roamed wild on the streets or been confined in squalid accommodation, in the hands of brutal and uncaring Catholic institutions.

Already by early 1939, colonel Segismundo Casado, a traditional career officer, had been preparing a coup against the government led from May 1937 by socialist prime minister Juan Negrin and was prepared to negotiate with the fascists, believing that Negrin was too subordinate to the communists.

They ousted the loyalist government of Negrin and replaced it by a defeatist junta of six military and political leaders headed by Casado, recently appointed military commander of the Madrid Zone. The coup was supported by the CNT, the secret service of the Republic (SIM) a section of the PSOE, a section of the UGT and disillusioned anarchist leaders because they believed that the war was lost.

When negotiations with Casado failed, Negrin fled to France with Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria), Vicente Uribe (PCE), and foreign minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo (PSOE) in a plane piloted by Hidalgo de Cisneros. Casado had been preparing to hand them over to Franco.

Despite its original tough talk, the junta pleaded for a “surrender with honour,” but Franco refused to accept any conditions. His victory was characterised by brutal reprisals against Republican supporters including massacres (50,000 in the immediate aftermath) and tens of thousands imprisoned or forced into exile.

Just before the final defeat of the Republic, de la Mora left for the US to solicit aid for the Republic, and while there she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Jay Allen, Paul Elliot and Martha Gellhorn, some of whom she had already met in Spain.

While there she wrote In Place of Splendour which was published in New York to wide acclaim. In 1939 she settled in Mexico. Cisneros meanwhile had moved to the USSR in 1939, where de la Mora’s daughter, Luli Bolin de la Mora, had been evacuated and assisted the Soviet war effort. He later lived in Poland, where he wrote his memoirs, but moved to the warmer climes of Romania in 1962; he died there in 1966.

De la Mora died tragically in a car accident in Guatemala in 1950. Pablo Neruda delivered her funerary oration saying: “Constancia, your leaving is a blow to our hearts’ core and fallen in our midst like a black ray of lightning, like a terrible shadow.”

Spanish poet and communist Rafael Arlberti, upon hearing of her death wrote: “... militant until the day of your unexpected death/ It was not the servitude to dark fears / of your heart during the bitter hours./ It was love, blind hope, luminous dedication/ to the point of obliterating the lofty traces of your origin.”

Her book remains one of the most powerful and perceptive of Spanish Civil War narratives and with resonances for us today still.

In Place of Splendour, by Constancia de la Mora is available from The Clapton Press, £12.99