About this coin
Face value: 5, 25 or 50 pesetas
Collector value: ummmm...
Great! A free one!
PTA is short for peseta. The coin was a Nineteenth Century invention, a conscious effort to de-monarchize and decimalize Spanish currency. This particular coin is an artifact of the regime of dictator Francisco Franco. Pesetas of this design always bear the date 1957, but were in fact minted between 1958 and 1975. It's an attractive coin with an ugly story.
The inscription above the eagle is "una grande libre" which Alta Vista renders as "great a free one." In fact, it should be separated with commas: "Great, Free, One." This text is part of a document called the Spanish Patriotic Catechism, required in Spanish classrooms throughout the 1940s. It is a piece of nationalist propaganda of the malignant kind, defining Spain as
"One, great, free, Catholic, imperial and mother of twenty nations."
But it goes on to define the seven enemies of Spain as "liberalism, democracy, Judaism, Freemasonry, capitalism, Marxism and separatism." How you can count capitalism and Marxism as your enemies is a mystery to me. That leaves you with...barter? Hunting-gathering? The Freemasonry thing, though, is probably because they turned Franco down when he was a military officer. He developed a paranoia about the Masons. Of course, the Jew thing was quite the rage in Europe at the time.
The Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War was a complicated war at a difficult time, full of dreadful things, like Ernest Hemingway. It was a fight to the death between the bad guys and those other bad guys.
Spain had been a monarchy through most of its history, a declining and sour monarchy in the 19th Century. Twice, the nation test drove a Republic, but couldn't quite make the sale.
The Second Republic was wobbly at best, and in 1936 tensions boiled over and the revolution began. The conservatives were the revolutionaries, if that doesn't make your head hurt. Forces for the sitting government were made up of urban workers, peasants, intellectuals, Basque nationalists, socialists, Stalinists, Troyskyites and anarchists. The revolutionaries were traditionalists, fascists, monarchists, nationalists, Catholics, farmers, landowners, businessmen and the military. Put it this way, when Hitler's rooting for one side, and Stalin's rooting for the other, who do you root for?
Plenty of the world's intellectuals rooted for the communist side, and some travelled to Spain to fight for it. They lost. There may still be people who romanticize the losing side of the Spanish Civil War, but they would be the sort of people who think communism will work if only somebody does it right.
On the other hand, it's no use pretending the winning side were the good guys, either. Francisco Franco, the ranking Big Guy of the revolution, ruled until his death by a combination of divisiveness and heavy military police presence. The picture of these times is further muddied by assassinations and acts of violence in the country that were probably entirely personal, historical and apolitical. It was an exceedingly dirty business.
In many ways, the Spanish Civil War was a foretaste of WWII, though Franco declined an active role with the Axis. The first joint military operation between Germany's Nazis and Italy's Fascists was a bombing operation on the Basque town of Guernica in Spain, which tragically resulted in the ugliest oil painting in history.
El Caudillo de España
The rather ordinary-looking dumpy old man on the heads side is Generalísimo Francisco Franco.
He had not originally been the leader of the opposition, and indeed had not set out to be part of a revolution at all. He had served many years in the army, apparently bravely and well, and was in control of colonial forces in Morocco when the fighting broke out at home. He was the highest-ranking man standing when the smoke cleared.
Despite alliances with demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini, Franco wasn't really an idealogue. He believed broadly in church and tradition. And, probably, Generalísimo Francisco Franco. His party's platform was so vague and incoherent, it was scarcely a party at all.
Franco declared Spain a monarchy, then didn't declare himself or anyone else the king for many years. Though his official title was Head of State, he adopted many of the titles and privileges of a king. Like the palace. He ultimately named Prince Juan Carlos his successor.
Franco hovered on his deathbed for many weeks. There has been speculation that he was deliberately kept semi-alive with medical technology so that he could die on the same day as the founder of a rightist political party. For all those weeks, news broadcasts frequently mentioned that "Francisco Franco is still alive."
For weeks after his death, during the news portion of the new program Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase solemnly announced, "this just in — Francisco Franco is still dead." It was their first great catch phrase.
G'wan, it won't bite you
It's funny about buying coins in bulk; you tend to get a lot of same ones in a shipment. Which makes sense, if you think about it. This bag had an inordinate number of Spanish pesetas and Turkish lira.
It's a slightly uneasy thing, holding a dictator's money. But bad people and bad times are part of the story, too. Do let me know if you snag one. Address correspondence to: coins@FieldNotebook.com.
History: bought as part of a 10 kilo bag of coins in August, 2004.
