100 Objects from Century of the Child

Attributed to Augusto. ¿Que fais-tu pour empêcher cela? (What are you doing to prevent it?). 1937

During the Spanish Civil War, which ravaged the country from 1936 to 1939, women and children were often the principal victims of the indiscriminate bombing of cities by the Nationalists. Images of dead children and grief-stricken mothers featured prominently in Republican propaganda, such as in this poster, which incorporates a photograph by the Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa. George Orwell, a British journalist and volunteer on the Republican side, observed that “the revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.”

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