The Emperor’s New Clothes: ‘Objectivity’ and Revisionism in Spanish History

‘And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.’ (George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays)

‘Tell me what you boast about and I’ll tell you what you lack’. (Popular Spanish expression)

Manuel Álvarez Tardío y Roberto Villa García, El precio de la exclusión: La política durante la Segunda República, Madrid, Encuentro, 2010; 320 pp.; ISBN 9788499200309

Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Fernando del Rey Reguillo (eds), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited: From Democratic Hopes to the Civil War (1931–1936), Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 2011; 320 pp.; ISBN 9781845194598

Julián Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010; 370 pp.; ISBN 9780521737807

Gutmaro Gómez and Jorge Marco, La obra del miedo. Violencia y sociedad en la España franquista (1936-1950) (prologue by Julio Aróstegui), Barcelona, Peninsula, 2011; 384 pp.; ISBN 9788499420912

While within Spain the fight for memory and the battle over the past is pursued in a way that is unprecedented in western Europe, the meaning of Benedetto Croce’s maxim – ‘all history is contemporary’ – is evidently lost on a certain type of historian of Spain. Heated debates over Spanish memory and politics are largely inevitable if we recall how undefeated Francoism was timorously superseded by a democracy which, unlike in Germany and Italy, was erected on the foundations of the old dictatorship, accompanied by officially cultivated amnesia, a ‘pact of forgetting’ and a tacit agreement between right and left not to punish anyone for crimes committed during the regime.

Thirty-six years after the death of the dictator, the limits of post-Francoist democratization were sharply exposed in the summer of 2011 by the scandal surrounding the publication of a Diccionario Biográfico Español by the Real Academia de la Historia (RAH). The context and playing out of this controversy shed important light on the nature of the historiography of contemporary Spain, as well as issues relating to power, partisanship, scholarship and memory. There is also a direct line to be drawn between the Diccionario affair and the first two books listed above: Manuel Álvarez Tardío, co-author of one these titles and co-editor of the other, along with Stanley Payne, the keynote contributor to The Spanish Second Republic Revisited, both published entries in the Dictionary.

The RAH, it must be noted, is unrepresentative of the Spanish historical profession today and of the overwhelming bulk of historical research produced in universities since Franco’s death. Although the RAH is publicly funded – with an annual budget of nearly €900,000 – it is a residue of the dictatorship. Thoroughly undemocratic, its president since 1998, the Marquis of Castrillón, Gonzalo Anes, can be re-elected indefinitely. Moreover, the RAH functions as a private club. It does not accept applications from scholars. There is no competition for places and membership is strictly by invitation. As of summer 2011, the bulk of its 36 members, 15 of whom were then over 80 years old, were steeped in Francoist culture. Its leading members include senior clergy and a retired Inspector from the Brigada Político-Social, Franco’s notorious secret police. A similar scenario would be inconceivable in post-Fascist Italy or post-Nazi Germany. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the RAH comprises only three women members and not a single contemporary historian. ¹

Most Spaniards were oblivious to the RAH until the scandal surrounding the Dictionary, which was lavishly funded with nearly €6.5 m under a 1999 accord approved by the right-wing administration of José María Aznar, broke. Once published, the content of the Dictionary, co-ordinated by the octogenarian Anes, provoked a furore, being roundly denounced by figures such as Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

So what was the controversy about? Besides a complete absence of editorial control, friends and ideological bedmates were invited to write entries (and be well-rewarded from public funds) regardless of their suitability. The most contentious entry – that of Franco – was written by Luis Suárez Fernández, a medievalist and unashamed admirer of a man he refused to acknowledge as a dictator. Other contributors openly identified with the ideas of the dictatorship: one entry lauded the ‘glorious death’ of right-wingers during the ‘crusade’ that was the civil war, that anti-communist ‘war of liberation’ against the ‘practically dictatorial’ Second Republic. ²

Many of the contributors repeatedly, and with considerable ennui, emphasized the scrupulous impartiality of their work. Thus Suárez, the author of the infamous entry on Franco, explained in an interview with a left-wing Spanish daily that he had penned an ‘objective’ study, explaining his refusal to mention Franco’s repression on the grounds that this would constitute an inappropriate ‘value judgement’. ³ In the first two books under review here we witness the same tendency to lay claim to ‘objectivity’, a central shibboleth of right-wing and centre-right historians working on contemporary Spanish history nowadays.

Indeed, ‘objectivity’ for these historians is little more than a slogan, an assertion that is rarely demonstrated. At best it is a nod towards what they believe is good practice. But they show no readiness to engage in their writing with conceptual issues surrounding notions of ‘impartiality’ and ‘bias’. Perhaps they are simply oblivious to these. Whatever the case, one of the clarion calls of Spain’s new historical revisionism is that historians with leftist sympathies succumb, perforce, to their impassioned and ideological positions, thereby compromising the necessary standards of ‘scientific objectivity’. Thus, the doyen of pro-Francoist history writing, the publicist Pio Moa, repeatedly accuses his mainly liberal or social-democratic detractors of rancour and even of being apologists for the USSR. ⁴ While most (but not all) professional historians are averse to being identified with Moa’s poorly documented and explicitly propagandist conclusions, some of his revisionist tenets have been embraced by a medley of conservative scholars within the university system, where such ideas are endowed with an aura of academic respectability and validity. ⁵ The works by Álvarez, who has publicly defended Moa’s oeuvre, Rey and Villa, can, albeit to varying degrees, be taken as examples of this trend: in what is at times almost a nineteenth-century belief in the neutrality of their ‘scientific research’, they pose as ‘objective’ historians who, through their unimpeachable professionalism and unflinching will to neutrality, have risen above the ideological mêlée that consumes others from within the historical profession.

Even if we follow the lead of Álvarez, Rey and Villa by riding roughshod over twentieth-century debates relating to hermeneutics, epistemology and their implications for historiography, it is still incumbent upon a critical reviewer to put their claims of ‘neutrality’ to the test and, in doing so, one is immediately confronted with the limitations of their approach.

El precio de la exclusion has generated much excitement in Spain’s leading right-wing newspapers, whilst predictably going unacknowledged in the liberal-left press. (El País, the leading paper of the democratic era, like some of the historians who write for it, displays a capricious, some might argue dictatorial, tendency to ignore studies that challenge its discourse.) Firmly located within what we might call the neo-revisionist canon, the central findings in Álvarez’s and Villa’s volume are compatible with, possibly even inspired by, the old Francoist assertion that the left provoked civil war. Perhaps this is not so surprising. After all this study is published by Ediciones Encuentro which includes Moa among its authors. Encuentro is also closely linked to the Spanish chapter of Communion and Liberation – a shadowy, authoritarian Catholic sect founded in Italy, which was implicated in the Tangentopoli scandal of the 1990s before associating with the coalition of forces around Berlusconi. Less important in Spain, Communion and Liberation nevertheless actively promotes ‘theo-conservative’ ideas within the universities. Notwithstanding their publisher’s ties to the Catholic church, a major protagonist in Spain’s 1930s crisis, Álvarez and Villa repeatedly proclaim their impartiality. Nor would it seem a problem for Álvarez to preserve his equanimity as a historian while participating in the activities of the militantly neo-liberal FAES Foundation, the brainchild of former Primer Minister Aznar, who has publicly praised Álvarez’s work. ⁶

For all their stress on ‘objectivity’, a careful reading of El precio de la exclusión reveals it to be far from even-handed in the respective criticisms of right and left. The comparative pretensions of this work are a case in hand. Álvarez and Villa contrast unfavourably the birth of the Spanish Second Republic with French republicanism during 1869–72, lamenting, in particular, the absence of a Spanish Léon Gambetta capable of incorporating the moderate Catholic right within the republican project, as occurred during the French Third Republic. Sadly, the authors’ familiarity with nineteenth-century French history does not extend to the workings of comparative methodology. This book is a reminder that, while comparative methods can produce rich and exciting conclusions, if utilized carelessly they become an unreliable methodological road map, leading us here to a one-dimensional and purely formalistic approach. There is no consideration of the wildly different domestic social, economic and political contexts and international circumstances that shaped political developments in 1860s France and 1930s Spain, factors that need to be in the foreground to make a meaningful comparison. Moreover, having constructed the French road as a kind of ‘ideal type’ that conveniently allows them to flag up the shortcomings of Spain’s republicans, Álvarez and Villa do not pursue their comparative agenda with rigour.

According to Álvarez and Villa, the Second Republic was the product of a ‘revolution’ (37), not a tacit agreement between sectors of the liberal-left opposition to the monarchy and members of the military top brass who, for a variety of reasons, were alienated from King Alfonso XIII. ⁷ It was only after General Sanjurjo, the army head of the paramilitary Civil Guard, approved this ‘revolution’ that the apprehensive opposition pushed ahead with the transition to a new political order, whereupon, in the version of Álvarez and Villa, the architects of the new regime behaved in a Jacobin, undemocratic and exclusivist manner that poisoned political relations. Spain’s ‘first democracy’, as Payne described the Republic in one of his earlier works ⁸ , is represented here as ‘Year Zero’, or as a major rupture with what the authors claim were earlier dynamics of ‘political modernisation’ (283). Again, as with the issue of ‘objectivity’, this claim is asserted rather than demonstrated. First of all, Álvarez and Villa, like other revisionist and neo-revisionist historians, exaggerate the democratic capacity of the supposedly ‘liberal’ Restoration monarchy (1875–1923), a system customarily viewed by historians and political scientists as ‘not democratic’, rooted in ‘coercion’ and ‘fraud’. ⁹ Meanwhile, the authors do not explain how the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera (1923–30), in many ways a precedent for the Franco regime, sustained the modernizing trends they allege the Republic trampled on. By ignoring the dynamics of political repression directed at the left in the decades before the Republic, it is hard to understand fully the exclusion that Álvarez and Villa take as their subject. One does not normally expect such myopia from historians when it comes to reading the past.

If Álvarez and Villa treat the Republic in a vacuum, in isolation from the past, so too they approach their subject in narrow political/institutional terms, in what is effectively a ‘top-down’ political-science concern with ‘the centres of political decision-making’ (15) and the formulation of the rules of the new political game. On one level, this book is significant for its systematic treatment of some big political questions that are only touched upon in many of the general histories of the period. Examples include the nature of the presidency and the electoral system and the impact of the enfranchisement of women, who voted for the first time in the 1933 elections and who, as the authors demonstrate, were less decisive in the victory of the centre-right than has been claimed. Yet all too often this important work is undermined by the aforementioned bias, which leads to selection of case studies that invariably reflect negatively on the liberal-left while favouring the right. We see this in the longest chapter, a consideration of the Law for the Defence of the Republic, a draconian and arbitrary law, which, passed in the first few months of the new democracy, allowed the authorities to repress political dissent. Álvarez and Villa focus solely on the law’s application against the right, excluding revolutionary groups from their survey, despite the fact that the law was used far more aggressively against the radical left.

In the final analysis the authors jettison their aim of objectivity in favour of the quest for attributing responsibility for the failure of the Second Republic: they blame the first republican-socialist government – the real baddies in their story – for adopting anti-clerical policies, which, they claim, with considerable teleology, doomed the Republic to ‘failure’ by alienating a large body of Catholic opinion and created a time bomb that exploded in 1936 in civil war. (Certainly there was insensitivity, but when a government comes to power committed to separating church and state then a clash with Catholic opinion is obviously inevitable.)

Absent here is any consideration of the corporatist and authoritarian right’s ambivalence towards democracy and how this paved the way for the military-fascist coup. Rather, democracy’s ‘failure’ owed to leftist sectarianism and extremism, which excluded all but the most revolutionary groups in society, with the result that in the spring of 1936 the Republic ceased to be a democracy. And so, we are back with the Francoist claim that civil war erupted due to the Bolshevizing Popular Front and the army rebels are transformed from the assassins of a young democracy into the defenders of Christian civilisation against a proto-Soviet regime.

Unsurprisingly, similar themes get a generous airing in Álvarez and Rey’s co-edited book, even though it would be inaccurate to suggest that all the contributors to this collection can be considered revisionist. As with the previous study, the clear political thrust of this volume ensures that it fails in its own terms as ‘objective’ history. This claim is repeated mantra-like in the initial dozen pages, first of all in the preface by series editor and contributor Nigel Townson ¹⁰ , who also happens to be a departmental colleague of one of the co-editors at Madrid’s Complutense University. After triumphantly declaring that the ‘impassioned debate’ and ‘politicisation that has characterized so much of the writing on the Second Republic’ (viii) is transcended here, Townson denounces ‘anti-Francoist’ scholars for seeking to ‘replace the dictatorial narratives with progressive, democratic ones’ and for their ‘pronounced tendency to exonerate the forces of the left, while excoriating those of the right, in relation to the regime’s collapse into civil war in 1936’. Without a hint of awareness that this might actually constitute a political critique derived from the author’s own ideological tastes, we are reassured that the ‘group of leading Spanish scholars’ and their international associates (vii) in this volume have a common mission: to ‘escape the ideological certainties’ and ‘explain this dynamic, agitated period in Spanish history in all its complexity’ (viii).

Yet a cursory glance at the table of contents reveals to anyone familiar with this period that there are fundamental gaps in coverage. For instance, the anarchists, so often seen as a major source of agitation and instability, are nowhere to be found, as is the case with the role of the so-called ‘historic nationalities’ (Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia), whose drive for autonomy and Home Rule was portrayed by the centralizing extreme right and their military supporters as the ‘break-up’ of Spain. A clue to the omission of any consideration of anti-state nationalisms is the fact that all the Spanish contributors are apparently from either the centre or the south of Spain. While certainly there are passing references to competing nationalisms, it is remarkable that in a 20-page consolidated bibliography that includes relevant (along with some irrelevant) studies in Castilian, English, French, Italian and Portuguese, there is not a single work in Basque, Catalan or Galician. This does not do justice to the important historical research that has taken place in Spain’s post-1978 ‘autonomous communities’. Equally telling is the choice, doubtless with a degree of irony, of a cover photograph showing ‘Miss Spain’ 1931, re-named ‘Miss Republic’, gleefully endorsing the new democracy. The 1930s were important years for the political mobilization of women, although gender issues do not feature in the various chapters – produced, incidentally, by the exclusively male contributors to this book.

The themes touched upon in the preface are developed more fully in the co-editors’ introduction: they explain how all contributors adopt ‘a serious, scientific and distanced approach’ (6) to produce ‘scientific knowledge’ unsullied by ‘political’ concerns, whereas other historians, that is those with whom they disagree, apparently succumb to ‘ideological prejudices that cloud their good judgement’, resulting in ‘militant’ history, a drawback to ‘passionate’, ‘simplistic’ and ‘unscientific’ positions of yesterday (4). Apparently ‘leaving aside all forms of sectarianism or prejudices of any kind’, the co-editors warn against ‘structural interpretations – economic, sociological, cultural – that have been so in vogue among historians during the last decades’ and ‘those post-modern and deconstructivist analyses that have represented a real step backwards intellectually’ (5). These flawed approaches, along with the interest in ‘historical memory’, produced, we are told, a ‘regression’ in historiography (6). Rather than ‘spreading all kinds of nonsense’, Álvarez and Rey prefer a ‘Third path…above all kinds of political polemics – past and present – and disconnected from myths, condemnations and self-interested manipulations’ (7). This task requires a ‘reaffirmation of the role of political history’, the ‘non-ideological’ kind that clearly leads to immodesty or, as they put it: ‘the most significant and original conclusions produced by scholars into the Second Spanish Republic in recent years’ (4). And it could be no other way, since chapters have been prepared in ‘the honest and rigorous manner’ of ‘objective’ scholars (7).

But perhaps it would be more ‘honest’ if would-be ‘objective’ historians came clean about their political agenda. Payne, one of the first academic historians to endorse publicly the revisionist Moa, comes closest in his chapter, when he announces his crusade against the ‘ideological emphases of Political Correctness, the post-Marxist ideology of the Western left’ and ‘the dominant ideology of the Western world’ (14). For my part, I certainly have nothing against academics participating in public or political debates. On the contrary, I think this is an important way of bridging the gulf between the academy and civil society. But it seems problematic that academics adopt the moral high ground of ‘objectivity’ while simultaneously obscuring their own political agenda, especially when it looms large in their writing. And when they berate historians for being ‘impassioned’ simply because they have a different political view, here we move into the realms of deceit and mischief making. It is therefore worthy of note that Álvarez, like his contributor Luis Arranz Notario, both write for neo-liberal journals, like La Ilustración Liberal, ‘a journal of political and economic thought dedicated to spreading liberalism’, to which Moa also contributes (along with radical right journalist Federico Jiménez Losantos, who persists with the conspiracy theory that the parliamentary left connived in the March 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid). Another contributor, Pedro Carlos González Cuevas, has recently been accused by Ismael Saz, a respected history professor, of espousing ‘Spanish-style denialism’. ¹¹

So for all the moral effluvia of the co-editors and their contributors, the political inspiration of this volume is as transparent as the Emperor’s new clothes: in effect, the paragons of ‘objectivity’ conflate their own positions, likes and dislikes with a new truth: ‘all of us begin from a positive view of parliamentary democracy’ (8), Álvarez and Rey inform us. When did such a position cease to be ‘ideological’ or ‘political’? Is Rey’s admiration for intellectuals such as Renzo de Felice, François Furet and Ernst Nolte ‘non-ideological’? In short, the attack on much of post-Francoist historiography as biased ‘militant history’ cannot cast a smokescreen over prejudices clearly inspired by older historiographical schools of thought that are anything but ‘neutral’. We have here a book informed by a militant conservative perspective, a stance that is firmly rooted in Spain and that inevitably garners support in a society still shaped by undefeated Francoism.

A key function of this volume is to show that the Republic was not a proper democracy (Payne and Arranz). By conflating ‘liberalism’ with ‘democracy’, a direct line is established between Spain’s current democracy and the Restoration Monarchy, while the much-publicized anti-democratic deficits of the latter are airbrushed from the historical record (2–3). There is a real determination to distance Franco from European fascism by defining him as anything but fascist (González Cuevas), while portraying the authoritarian Catholic right as essentially democratic and benign by inflating the importance of its barely noticeable Christian-democratic wing (Álvarez). As in El precio de la exclusion, the wrongdoers in this volume are principally the socialists and the Left Republicans (Payne, Arranz and Villa), who, we are told, caused civil war by using democracy for their partisan ends and by destroying political harmony with their attempts to create a ‘revolutionary’ order. Throughout this study, there are numerous instances where different contributors, constrained by their ideological straitjackets, ignore sources, fashion straw men, reach untenable conclusions and/or distort the subject. A particular constant is the omission of potentially ‘dissident’ sources. Despite launching a broadside against ‘intellectual laziness’ (18), Payne presents us with a shockingly incomplete bibliography. He ignores relevant works by Paul Preston and Eduardo González Calleja. In similar fashion, González Cuevas and José Parejo Fernández both overlook Sheelagh Ellwood’s major study of the Falange, which is available in Castilian.

These shortcomings are most manifest in the weakest chapter, in which Gerald Blaney Jr. promises to give us a ‘new perspective’ on the Civil Guard, the paramilitary force responsible for public order in contemporary Spain. Widely seen as anti-democratic (it was heavily involved in the failed August 1932 coup against the Republic and over 70 per cent of the force supported the July 1936 coup that preceded the civil war), Blaney Jr., who clearly feels great admiration for the Civil Guard, belittles its role as a force of repression, although he admits that in the face of ‘the maddened masses…some civil guards could resort to extreme measures’ (205). Despite his highly idiosyncratic and partial reading of the sources, Blaney Jr. typifies the untrammelled conceit we see throughout this volume, deriding the ‘surprisingly poor methodology’ of scholars that ‘present a uniformly negative view of the corps’ (202). Blaney Jr. seeks to redress this by citing uncritically the official Civil Guard press, telling us how, on the basis of letters from members of the corps sent to their professional publications, individual guards saw themselves not as an ‘army of occupation’ or as ‘the enemy’ of the people (203). In short, his ‘new perspective’ consists of offering a vision of the corps based entirely on how they perceived themselves. So we must then conclude that civil guards spent most of their time behaving altruistically, rather than imposing manu militari inequitable agrarian property relations. Elsewhere (216) he talks of the ‘Mano Negra’ (‘Black Hand’) conspiracy of 1881–2, an apparent plan by a secret society to murder the southern rich, as if it really existed, even though experts concur it was a fiction concocted by the monarchist authorities to justify repressing the Andalusian workers’ movement. Indeed, official court documents revealed how a Civil Guard officer discovered the decisive documentary proof of the existence of ‘Mano Negra’, by conveniently stumbling across a copy of this secret society’s written constitution in the street. ¹² Decades later the myth of the ‘Mano Negra’ became a horror story among Spanish children, while for Blaney Jr., the fact that civil guards still discussed it constitutes proof enough the organization was real.

The last two books are representative of the dynamism of the historical profession in Spain today. From a methodological perspective, both studies serve as a reminder of the deficiencies of the revisionist ‘top-down’, high-politics approach to historical investigation. The work of Julián Casanova, one of the most expert scholars working on 1930s Spain, has already appeared in English and has now been translated by a prestigious publisher. The Spanish Republic and Civil War is a broad survey of this tumultuous decade: by synthesizing much (though not all) of the most important new research and written with a compelling narrative style, this book will be of considerable use to undergraduate students and to a general readership. (Since we will hopefully see a second edition, ideally the index and bibliography can be improved and updated. The more I used both, the more inaccuracies I encountered relating to page numbers and dates of publication.)

Casanova adroitly takes on board issues that have long concerned historians: the problematic consolidation of the democratic Republic, the causes of the civil war and the factors that led to the triumph of a counter-revolutionary coalition backed by Hitler and Mussolini. In particular, Casanova depicts Spain’s crisis in the 1930s in the context of European events, one of the main blind spots of the revisionists. Like Álvarez and Rey, he appreciates that this period raises immense passions, but, unlike them, he is intelligent enough to avoid making extravagant claims about ‘objectivity’. The irony, however, is that he actually comes far closer to adopting a detached and neutral perspective, something that is reflected in back-cover endorsements of this book by both Payne and Paul Preston, the two leading Hispanists in the Anglo-Saxon world, who, for all their differences, are united in their respect for Casanova’s scholarship.

The first part of the book focuses on the Republic. It is striking that Casanova’s general appraisal of the Republic succeeds also by considering long-term conflicts, such as how the historic struggle between Catholics and anti-clericals burst to the surface in the Republic, when the former felt unprotected by a government committed to separating church and state. Casanova demonstrates the hollowness of the revisionist claim that civil war was provoked by working-class maximalism and/or republican incompetence. He makes it clear that at the time of the February 1936 elections, and afterwards, democracy still existed. Yet as soon as the Popular Front electoral victory was announced, the fatal readiness of ruling elites and extremist sections of the army to destroy democracy impelled right-wing army officers to plan the coup that took Spain to civil war. Casanova arrives at these conclusions via his generally quite balanced interpretations, unaccompanied by the sound of grinding axes. Indeed, he voices criticisms of all political factions and actors across the political spectrum for being confrontational at different times and in different ways. Whereas Álvarez, Villa and Rey obsess about the ‘failure’ of democracy, Casanova sees nothing inevitable about the outbreak of civil war. Avoiding the teleology we find in the first two books, Casanova’s interpretation leaves room for contingency, circumstance, along with trial and often error, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, on the part of political actors and forces.

The remainder of the book assesses the civil war and is an excellent addition to the vast literature on this subject. Across five themed chapters, Casanova tackles all the key issues. While his detractors will view him as being sympathetic to the left, he does not shy away from analysing the bloodletting behind the lines on both sides of the war. Finally, in a short epilogue he discusses the reasons for the Republic’s defeat, concluding that Franco’s rebels could not have fought their long war against the Republic, let alone won, had it not been for fascist aid, most of it provided on credit. At the same time, he perhaps downplays Prime Minister Juan Negrín’s stubborn and ultimately naïve hope that the western democracies would come to support the Republic.

The harrowing state violence and repression of the civil war and the first years of the Franco dictatorship are the subject of Gutmaro Gómez and Jorge Marco Gómez in La obra del miedo, a book that will hopefully be made available to an English-speaking audience. Like Casanova, Gómez and Marco display a methodological sophistication that is absent in the first two books. Eschewing a narrow focus on the institutional application of repression, the authors rely on ‘history from below’, micro-history and life histories to chart the impact of repression on the ground, at the base of society, on specific individuals, revealing the human and social effects of state terror. Yet rather than producing a narrowly social history of repression, the authors move beyond their analysis of the local and the micro. They develop their exploration of civil society to reach penetrating conclusions about ‘high politics’ during the Franco dictatorship. As a result, we have here an outstanding survey of the repressive mechanisms of Francoism, especially the nature of military justice and the prison system. According to the authors, 80 per cent of the staff of the ‘new state’ was recruited from fascist participants in the civil war, the other 20 per cent being drawn from supporters of Franco’s extreme right project.

Using important new source material, such as prison and military court archives and Francoist police records, Gómez and Marco demonstrate how a repressive project was fashioned at the start of the civil war. By 1938, Franco claimed to have a list of 2,000,000 people awaiting punishment and in the years that followed he went on to forge the most vicious dictatorship in Western Europe after that of Hitler. Contrary to the more benign picture of Franco’s terror painted by the revisionists, Gómez and Marco reveal the scale of the repression: around 1940, there were roughly 500,000 prisoners in concentration camps, well over 100,000 in punitive labour battalions and some 300,000 in jail. Beyond deaths from torture and through judicial and extra-judicial executions, between 1939 and 1944, around 150,000 prisoners died through disease and hunger, without even factoring in suicides. Inspired by Italian and German fascisms and characterized by its use of slave labour, Francoism was – contrary to the claims made by the RAH and some of the authors cited above – a totalitarian regime. Gómez and Marco thus can produce significant findings in regard to the consequences of the systematic and implacable repression of the 1940s, explaining how it had the advantage of eliminating threats to the dictatorship and, moreover, cowing and traumatizing civil society. This is achieved through their investigation of cultural aspects of repression and how Francoism sought to Christianize, ‘purify’ and re-educate the working class, which was for long periods viewed with intense suspicion and hostility by the authorities. The intense repression of the early years of the dictatorship analysed in La obra del miedo resulted in a period of relative social peace for the Francoists, who languished in power for nearly four decades. The longevity of their dictatorship, combined with the gradual nature of the political change of the 1970s and 1980s, which was itself very much shaped by fear, made it possible for the advocates of Francoism and fascism to make a strategic retreat from public positions of power. Yet their power and influence in society remained, and remains, great. And this means that attempts to speak freely and critically about dictatorship and fascism continue to meet with the apologetic ripostes of the revisionists, whose discourse seems to be motivated more by a nostalgia for undefeated Francoism, than the serious scholarly endeavour of recovering and explaining the past in the most rigorous manner. The dangers for historiography are obvious. The emphasis placed on parallels between 1930s Spain, Italy and Germany by Casanova, Gómez and Marco is an uncomfortable reality for the ‘truth’ of the revisionists, who cannot brook any challenge to their bid to whitewash the history of the Spanish right. The latter’s quest for ‘objectivity’ is nothing but a veil for the promotion of their own conservative historical memory, one that is partial and ideological and which advances an idealized view of the right, as witnessed in the RAH Dictionary and in the first two books under review. It is the hope of the reviewer, however, that studies like the last two discussed here will inspire future diversity and innovation within Spanish historiography, both of which are seriously threatened by the logic of revisionism and the censorship contained within its drive for ‘objectivity’.