Attacking Francoism

In recent years, a new generation of Spanish historians has debunked the old myths forged by Franco’s propaganda, but also by those who advocate the democratic transition.

The history of the Second Republic and Francoism has been the subject, since the very time of the events, of overpoliticized debates. These have been revived by a social movement which has been demanding for more than fifteen years that Franco’s violence and the suffering of its victims be exposed, and which today participates in denouncing the inadequacies of Spanish democracy. The special issue entitled “ History and conflicts of memory in Spain » published in the summer of 2015 in the magazine Twentieth century takes stock of the history of the period 1931-1975, and in particular of Francoism, in this context marked by memorial conflicts. To the fifteen articles making up the file are added several supplements (three descriptions of documentary funds and eighteen reviews), which make it both a research work and a working tool.

After an introductory article which retraces eighty years of research on the Second Republic, the civil war and Francoism, the file is organized into three parts. The first, entitled “ Political uses of the past », restores the multiplicity of discourses on the past in Spanish society today. It is in fact one of the biases of the two coordinators to put the discourses of historians on the same level as others (state and public, militant, fictional and supernatural – we will come back to this), by subjecting them to the same gaze. critical. The exploration and deconstruction of the way in which Spanish history has been and continues to be told allows us to situate the innovative nature of current research on Francoism, a sample of which is offered to us in the second and third parts. These have as their guiding thread two key questions for historians of the period: that of the nature of the regime (fascist or not), debated since the 1970s but which has seen recent developments, and that of the various attitudes of the population (consenting, passive or resistant) in the face of dictatorship, a pioneering front of current research.

History and memory in the spotlight

The first part opens with the historiography of the civil war and Francoism, the contributions of Sophie Baby and François Godicheau establishing the analytical starting point of the issue. They both show how interlocking metanarratives of civil war, dictatorship and transition crystallized during the transition to democracy between 1975 and 1982. These metanarratives function, they explain, like so many myths in the Barthian sense of the term (p. 65), and they too often continue to dominate academic work.

These mythological metanarratives can be summarized as follows: the transition to democracy was a great moment of reconciliation between Spaniards, marked by non-violence, the spirit of consensus and political moderation. This “ happy ending » (p. 61), to be credible, required not only a depoliticized reading of the civil war as a “ fratricidal conflict » (p. 62) in which the wrongs would have been shared, but also a watered-down vision of the dictatorship, which would have evolved naturally towards ever more flexibility, ultimately making the aforementioned reconciliation possible. This historical story was the scientific counterpart of the successive political legitimization speeches of those in power, first Francoist – who stopped glorifying the conquest in the 1960s to promote the peace brought by the regime -, then of the transition, who justified by this story the non-condemnation of the dictatorship and the absence of purification of its political personnel.

Having established these milestones, the first part continues the critical exploration of the political uses of the past. Rubén Pallol Trigueros takes us into the institutional mechanisms of history production under Francoism by analyzing the appointments and professional strategies of historians who entered the University in the 1940s. The novelist Isaac Rosa, in an interview conducted by Élodie Richard, explains the link maintained with history in his novels, in which we find “ the same state of mind as those who (…) began to open the mass graves » (p. 80): a desire to demystify the past, to revisit the regime’s lies concerning the extent of violence during and after the civil war, and a certain distrust of academic history. Another witness to the multiplicity of forms that conflicts of memory take today in Spain, the article by Stéphane Michonneau on the ruined village of Belchite. He successively analyzes the official heritage policies of the site, from 1937 to today, and the way in which, for ten years, the hidden memory of the republican victims has found expression through forms of wild rehabilitation (graffiti in the shapes of epitaph) or by a return of the repressed in the paranormal mode, part of the local population saying they see ghosts or hear sounds of war among the ruins.

Historiographical revision and subversion

Historians have been caught up in these conflicts of memory and in the questioning of “ the story we were told », a process in which they were also the actors (p. 32). This gave rise to an important historiographical renewal, further favored by the arrival at the University of a new generation of historians. These people, born in the 1970s and 1980s, are all the more inclined to deconstruct the myths crystallized during the political transition because they have not experienced it. In addition, they are much more aware than their elders of the tools and objects of their foreign colleagues. By bringing Spanish history and historiography into dialogue in an unprecedented way with international history and historiography, they break with a long tendency to consider Spain as an exception, a country apart whose history would not have not followed the same movement as that of the rest of Europe and could therefore not be analyzed using the same yardstick. Today’s Spanish historians systematically place their subject within the framework of international comparisons, and the best of them (those published in this file, in particular) do so with finesse, without wanting to assimilate Francoism at all costs. to Nazism and fascism.

Let’s give a few examples. In an article which opens the section on “ Franco regime » by an emblematic object, the prison, Gutmaro Gómez Bravo shows that it is not necessary to speak of “ spanish holocaust » to report prison violence. In this regard, he provides a salutary clarification on the eugenic theories developed by the military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nágera, which over the past fifteen years have given rise to dozens of books and articles by historians even though they “ did not inspire any provision which could have affected the internal regime of any repressive institution whatsoever » (p. 138). Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, on the other hand, shows the role of jurists and traditionalist Catholic ideologues from the Ministry of Justice in the development of a particularly invasive repression. Indeed, this was based on a system of conditional release linked not only to the moral repentance of the condemned (measured by prison chaplains), but also to the good behavior of their families, monitored by the local authorities. If we consider the hundreds of thousands of prisoners concerned, we measure the influence of the penitentiary institution on Spanish society.

In her article on the repression and protection of minors, Amélie Nuq questions the Francoist specificity of institutions which have not broken with previous personnel and legislation, and which are similar to the systems existing in Western democracies. The search for a specificity linked to the dictatorial and reactionary dimension of the regime then leads him to show, in an innovative way, that the frequency of internments of young girls because of their sexual behavior is less the work of the authorities than that of their their own families, who exploit the regime’s moralizing obsession to intern girls who pose a problem to them for other reasons, for example because they are rebellious at work (p. 172).

Also bringing an original contribution, far from any Manichaeism, to the debate on the collaboration of the population in repression, Jorge Marco explains that the armed resistance in Eastern Andalusia ends when former local guerrillas denounce and participate to the capture of a competing group still active, which has just been joined by some of their former members. These examples show the not only revisionist character (in the noble sense of the term), but also the subversive nature of this file, which undermines the historiography of the 1980s and 1990s as much as some of the most prominent current interpretations.

To conclude, we would like to return to two implicit aspects of this issue. Firstly, the young research that we are given to read is very precisely situated. This is both French and Spanish research, placed under the implicit patronage of the Casa de Velázquez, a French institution through which all French authors have passed, and whose Spanish contributors are regular collaborators. Without regretting this bias, which is part of a tradition of Franco-Spanish historiographical dialogue, we can wonder what would have changed in the style of the file the inclusion of representatives of Italian or Anglo-Saxon Hispanism, too. important than the French in this field. Second point, if the coordinators of the issue explain well why current research is obsessed with certain questions – the nature of the regime, political violence, the attitudes of the population −, we clearly see that certain parts of the history of Francoism are currently neglected, because they do not respond to a research agenda largely dictated by the memory and political context. This issue would have been the ideal place for a reflection on these unthoughts and these historiographical gray areas, outlining the new issues that the history of Francoism could develop in the future.