Jose Ortega y Gasset famously held that ‘Spain is the problem, Europe is the solution’. By the time of his death in 1955, there was a large Spanish community in Paris for whom Europe was, if not necessarily a solution, certainly an important question or term of reference. For Republican exiles, their very presence in France stemmed from a Spanish war that was in certain ways considered to be a European affair by Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike. In her obituary of Leon Blum on 22 March 1951, Janet Flanner noted that Blum's refusal to intervene in the Spanish civil war had ‘soured many European idealists’. In turn, Santiago Carrillo, exiled in Paris with the rest of the leadership of the Partido Comunista de Espana (PCE), indicted the supposedly democratic European powers for their failure to come to the aid of Spain.

The culture of the Parisian Spaniards connected to Europe not only in the development of international connections in what might be understood as a weak sense of Europeanisation, but also in their theoretical engagement with the idea of Europe. This question was posed and answered in different and often conflicting ways. These are examined in this chapter, and are contextualised in the contemporary Parisian intellectual field and comparable ideas within it.

This chapter, which takes both culture and exile in their broadest sense, will first survey pan-European cultural interactions in Paris involving the Spanish exiles. Then the following are identified and examined as theoretical concerns which repeatedly informed this community's cultural production and activity: the place of Spanish culture within European culture; the relationship between civilisation or culture and violence, and its implications for thinking about Europe; and a particular historically grounded interest in the theme of insiders and outsiders in Spain and, by extension, in Europe. Particular but not exclusive attention will be paid to four cultural pillars of Spanish exile circles in Paris for whom the question of Europe was important in various ways: Pablo Picasso, the writers Jorge Semprun and Juan Goytisolo, and the literary edition of Solidaridad obrera – the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist labour organisation, the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) that was itself banned from Franco's Spain.