Introduction: Re-Reading Francoism to Re-Read Post-1945 Europe

It is now nearly a decade since the historian Dan Stone selected this haunting exchange to open his provoking and prescient study of post-1945 Europe, Goodbye to All That?. The words come from a now famous film noir, The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns), produced in 1946 by the reconstituted German film industry. For its times the film turned a singularly honest gaze on the acute limitations of the denazification process in the territories that would become West Germany, limits which in the film are symbolized by a successful businessman who during the war had been responsible for murdering civilians. Stone's book, published in 2014, still contemplated with a modicum of optimism an opening-up to forms of post-Cold War clarity – a new demythologizing lens – with which he argued the post (Second World) war period in Europe could begin interpretatively and historiographically. ² That post-Cold-War opening was always a hesitant one for sure, and it has since fallen under a heavy shadow across Europe and the West, the result of ubiquitous re-ascendant ultranationalism in various guises. Since 1989 we have seen not only the dissolving of the historical mythologies and ‘half-truths’ underpinning post-1945 Europe's ‘antifascist consensus’, but an ensuing ultranationalist assault on the very value of antifascism itself. Today we can make these less-than-optimistic but eminently substantiable observations, but it remains more difficult to discern the shape of the inhospitable political and economic order which can be said to have ‘won’ the Cold War. Not least because in Spain, as elsewhere, the rise and rise of those ultranationalist forces sees populism existing in opaque relationship with a tacit pursuit of neoliberal economic policies.

Spain's own ‘postwar’ took the form of forty years of dictatorship, stretching from Francoism's military victory in the war of 1936–1939 to the transition out of formal dictatorship from the end of the 1970s. Francoism itself lived on, however – facilitated by the form that transition took – and it is now being recycled as a usable nationalism by the Spanish right. The Anglo-American gaze on Francoism also remains some way removed from any moment of post-Cold-War opening or clarity: there is a curious persistence in seeing a mythological form of Francoism, which was supposedly a throwback to the nineteenth century, or certainly to a pre-1914, ‘traditional’ form of authoritarianism ruling repressively over a static, largely passive society. This is Franco as a Spanish Horthy, but running longer, until the accelerated urbanization and consumerist-based industrialization of the 1960s upset things, causing Francoism as a state and ideology slowly to evaporate in the white heat of technology and technocratic governance/change. This abiding misrecognition of Francoism is what the current special issue seeks to address. Arguably, it is a misrecognition which has come at least in part from a lack of acquaintance with the past thirty years of empirical research on the dictatorship, because only a relatively small percentage of it is available in the Anglosphere even now, with most of the work generated by scholars researching inside Spain and publishing largely in Spanish.

What this work has cumulatively shown is that Francoism was anything but a throwback. It could not be a throwback because it was forged in a full-scale, internationalized civil war which mobilized almost all of the Spanish population, physically and psychologically, in conscription, or war-related labour on the home front, or in other forms of ‘work’, including the darker work of extrajudicial killing behind the lines. Taken together, this produced a new social and political landscape from which there could be no ‘going back’. It is perfectly true of course that most of the Franco coalition, both patrician and grass-roots conservatives, would have preferred to return to a Spain of villages and market towns where ordinary people ‘understood their place’, just as they would also have preferred still to have had a substantial empire, which might have made that older form of metropolitan order possible for longer in Spain – as it proved to be in neighbouring, still imperial, Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship. ³ But Spain's empire was long gone, and even before the war of 1936–1939, there had already been in the 1920s a process of European-boom-generated accelerating urbanization: along with Madrid and Barcelona, numerous urban centres on Spain's south-eastern seaboard grew during this period. This urbanizing process was part of what had produced the reforming Second Republic of 1931 in the first place. While that Republic was not socially or culturally comparable with Weimar, Spain's urban society of the 1930s was nevertheless far more variegated and developed than anything in Portugal or Greece, if indeed we want to use these not always helpful terms of geographical comparison. Urban Spain thus became, for a growing band of catastrophist conservatives – including, crucially, many army officers who had made their career in Spain's small colonial ‘consolations’ in North Africa – the dissolvent of all ‘national value’. The originating desire of war-born Francoism to push back against social as well as political change, and to tightly control society, would remain a permanent obsession right to the end, some forty years on. But to bid to achieve ‘stasis’ in the highly mobilized society of post-civil war in 1939 required new techniques of rule. Indeed, the ‘Francoism’ that had emerged from the war already contained as an integral part of it a radicalized mass social base which would play an active, and violent, role in the construction of the new Francoist state and society (Graham, Gómez Bravo). ⁴

This new mobilized base stretched far beyond war veterans of various types, and also beyond the new massified Falange which wartime Francoism had created, to embrace many other sectors of ordinary Spaniards, all those who felt some connection to the emergent order, and/or felt they could benefit from it materially. The dictatorship exhorted its supporters to denounce neighbours, friends or family who had (or were perceived to have) connections with the ‘criminal’ Republic. It was this mechanism of denunciation which triggered the mass military trials of ‘the defeated’, a process of summary justice which took Franco's new order deep into every town and village across Spain, turning tens and tens of thousands of denouncers into perpetrators, and violently remaking social relations thereby. By 1939 there was already a concentration camp network in Spain, along with forced labour camps of various types run by Franco's army, where both civilians and demobbed Republican troops were confined. But in Spain the direction of travel was from the camps and mass trials towards prisons ‘proper’, as the interned were transferred in train convoys (with high resulting mortality) to an expanding prison universe. Between 1939 and 1943 Spain had – even by highly unreliable (under-counted) official statistics – an average annual incarcerated population of two hundred thousand, compared with the average annual prison population of under 10,000 for the period 1931–1934 (Gómez Bravo, Richards). ⁵ (Official prison statistics from 1939 do not include those incarcerated in the camps and labour battalions, and are also highly unreliable on remand prisoners, which if taken altogether, would produce for the period between 1939 and 1943 a figure much closer to a million, out of a total population of some 24 million.) Franco's repression rolled on across the whole of the 1940s, and until 1948 Spain remained legally under a state of war. The repression comprised many other forms of mass mobilization of Francoist supporters as well as the purging of the professional classes (university staff, school teachers, Republican army officers, and so on). But it was the mass trials themselves which radically reordered local life, and triggered thereby the start of a vast process of forced migration of the persecuted – in that people had little choice if they were to find a liveable life – to the relative anonymity of bigger towns and cities (Richards, Graham/Lorenzo Rubio). Nor is there any clear break between this migratory process and the ensuing, also in many cases forced, migrations of the 1950s and 1960s, which would produce by far the largest rural-urban shift in Western Europe.

This population movement of the 1940s occurred even though free movement for ordinary people was technically illegal. It was of course vehemently opposed by the commanding heights of the dictatorship, which saw such movement – a product of their own policies – as a threat to the tight spatial control they now sought as a permanent solution to the dangers of class and mass society glimpsed during the 1930s Republic. Francoism's emerging and thereafter constant ideology was that of overseeing the maintenance of what it termed ‘social peace’: in other words, the bid to maintain in perpetuity a stable, ‘traditional’ and self-renewing hierarchical polity and society. This also explains of course why, in individual conurbations, Francoist mayors, police and other potentates were perfectly happy to pack off migrants on their journey in order to achieve that form of ‘social peace’ within their own bailiwick (Richards). But the reality in the 1940s was of a vast scale of coerced human movement, which individuals and families undertook to skirt the repression as well as the outbreaks of epidemic disease, which further blighted what were for millions of people, inside and outside the prison system, also years of raging hunger – and for some, starvation. This mass movement of people was described by one state official as the ‘dance of the Spaniards’ (Richards). So many people were on the roads that even the regime's determined bid to deploy the old vagrancy laws to stem this new social phenomenon came up short. Many migrants were detained and sent back, but most simply tried again, repeatedly. It was a human movement which counterpointed that of the prison convoys, seemingly endlessly transporting their ‘cargo’ from camps to prisons, or between one prison and another across Spain.

This mass repression of the 1940s was by far the most quantitatively extreme in forty years of Francoism – lethal as it was in many indirect ways too, beyond the extra-judicial and quasi-judicial executions, with deaths inside and outside camps and prisons occurring constantly from malnutrition, infectious disease and other forms of systemic neglect. It was also by far the most visible period of repression – given the whole country was pitted with prisons, camps and labour battalions. But what endured beyond the extremeness of the 1940s was the state's determination to exert close control of space, whether rural or urban. That would remain central to Francoism's project across its entire duration, and logically so, given its driving ambition remained the fending off of all change-bearing behaviours through the exercise of permanent security surveillance and control over the bulk of its population. In the pursuit of this goal, unrestrained violence, whether inside or outside the prisons, remained the default – which thus makes the Franco dictatorship a form of war against sectors of its own society.

It is precisely because of this state of affairs, and Francoism's originating ‘dream’ of total control that the authors of this special issue consider the idea of ‘prison worlds’ as a particularly productive lens through which to analyse Francoism as a whole. The most obvious and enduring connection between the prison inside and the one outside was ‘conditional liberty’, a highly punitive form of parole into which the bulk of the political prisoners taken during 1939–1943 were funnelled (Gómez Bravo, Graham/Lorenzo Rubio). But there was in general a stiflingly close police control operating in all living space ‘containing’ ordinary people, as well as the regime's overt framing of public health as an instrument of political control (Richards). All of which means that for the lives of millions in Spain, there was no clear dividing line between prison space and space ‘outside’. And while this was, again, much more visible in the 1940s, for example when prisoners’ destitute families used to camp out nearby to gaols or labour battalions – creating what the authorities saw as further public order problems – these guiding principles of social segregation and spatial control were the ‘alpha and omega’ of Francoism from the 1940s to the 1970s (Graham). ⁶

One crucial thread connecting inside and ‘outside’ the prisons was constituted by prisoners’ female relatives who also experienced their own form of ‘imprisonment’ in the shape of tight regime supervision, even if most of them were not ever physically incarcerated (Richards, Graham/Lorenzo Rubio). Women as a percentage of total gaol populations were always recorded as constituting as little as 5–10 per cent throughout Francoism. ⁷ It is true that this figure does not compute the regime's heavy use of brief and repeated ‘remand’ detentions against women apprehended for alleged prostitution, ⁸ but it does nevertheless indicate that, unlike for men, the forms in which most women experienced castigation and control by the Franco regime did not include prison confinement – for which reason we have not included a separate article in this special issue on women's prisons. Nevertheless, for those women who were imprisoned for what was deemed political activism, or sometimes in the 1940s in place of male relatives who had eluded capture, their experience of gaol was inflected by forms of physical and psychological abuse which were highly gender specific. Ever since the years of the battlefield war, all women deemed not to conform to conservative models of ‘true womanhood’ had been positioned on a very particular kind of front line, as emergent Francoism engaged in a violent process of reversing the gender changes associated with urban Republican Spain. Many women were subject to sexualized violence, whether rape or other forms of gender-specific abuse, most notably head shaving, dosing with castor oil and public parading around their villages. Rape was a frequent accompaniment of women's detention in police stations, and although it also happened inside gaol, to date we know less about sexualized violence in the gaols. The intensity of this violence was driven precisely by the fact that constructions of female ‘purity’ and ‘cleanliness’ lay at the core of fundamentalists’ belief in the need to banish and destroy threats to the new Francoist nation's ‘health’ and ‘virtue’. The regime's policing of gender would of course also always be directed against men who did not conform to conservative constructions of masculinity. This form of repression became much more visible in urban centres by the late-1960s as the dictatorship deployed expanded forms of preventive detention, including in a bid to repress dissenting forms of sexual behaviour, and especially if these were also linked to unconventional gender presentations; but here the police were always far more interested in the men. ⁹

In the 1940s itself, in so far as women were themselves gaoled for reasons other than their political profile or alleged prostitution, then it was for their involvement in the lowest levels of the ubiquitous, but illegal, black market – without which their families would have starved (Richards, Nuq). But most women who encountered the sharp end of Franco's state in the 1940s did so because they had state supervision imposed on them as the wives (sometimes sisters or mothers) of the vast numbers of male political prisoners. Poor urban women generally were also surveilled and supervised through the coercive workings of the state welfare agency or other lay Catholic organizations which operated in sync with the state system. There were probably only relatively low numbers of girls and young women in the youth reformatories, although to date we have little information and even fewer figures on this (Nuq). But women did come directly into the disciplinary purview of the powerful Francoist state agencies known as the Patronatos, which were staffed by church and lay Catholic personnel (Gómez Bravo). The Patronato de Protección a la Mujer [for the protection of women] supervised what Francoism saw as morally ‘fallen’ women, although the sparse research on it so far has mainly come from investigative journalists. Historical scholarship has more thoroughly explored the direct ways in which women, whether as prisoners themselves or more commonly as prisoner's wives, encountered the two most powerful Patronatos which together constituted the axis of Franco's prison system – the Patronato Central de Nuestra Señora de la Merced [our Lady of Mercy] and the Patronato Nacional de San Pablo. ‘Our Lady of Mercy’ was responsible for running the system of gaol labour, whereby some prisoners could shave time off their sentences through work, and also supervised the granting (or not) of parole. For its part, ‘San Pablo’ also supervised former prisoners, parolees and their families – the latter's ‘good moral behaviour’, especially a wife's, being essential both to the granting and the continuation of a prisoner's parole (Gómez Bravo).

The pivotal role of these two prison Patronatos, operating inside and beyond the prison walls, indicates how integral Church and lay Catholic personnel were to the implementation of extensive disciplinary systems under Francoism. In the vital sphere of prison education, the state granted the Church a monopoly contract which was maintained across the entire dictatorship. There was nothing surprising in this process of co-option for a number of reasons. First, the Church had long occupied a position under the state umbrella, as was clear in key public order legislation of the early twentieth century (Graham). Second, the Franco dictatorship emerging from the civil war was short of personnel of every kind – in the numbers required to implement the desired mass repression – and by deploying church and lay Catholic staff the state was incorporating the most effective and plentiful local material (Gómez Bravo). Third, and crucially here in terms of that efficacy, there was a remarkable degree of ideological agreement between Franco's state and the Catholic hierarchy over what prison education should produce – it should turn ‘Republicans’ into compliant, National-Catholic subjects. Church personnel thus participated in running the new state's regime of punishment and psychological reconfiguration, built around ostensibly ‘older’ notions of guilt, penitence and expiation. It turned out to be a hybrid solution that perfectly met all needs.

The ‘educational’ process implemented by religious personnel centred on an extraordinarily pressured programme: first to make political prisoners ‘confess’ the ‘error’ of their beliefs; and second to perform penitence and ‘be forgiven’ in order to enter the National-Catholic community. If they did not do so, they were denied all meliorative measures – crucially, they could not access the system bestowing reductions of sentence via prison labour, and they were ineligible for parole. Everything about the space and militarized routines in prison was choreographed to inculcate a sense of total dependency/inferiority: absolute compliance in all practical and doctrinal matters was essential, but this was also hugely complicated by the brutal daily reality of gaol, with its endemic corruption and clientelism (Gómez Bravo, Graham/Lorenzo Rubio). In sum, church personnel ran a prison education system which was a psychologically violent process that aimed at a fundamental change in prisoners’ subjectivity, or at the very least a ‘disciplined’ outward compliance which to all intents and purposes destroyed their previous marks of identity/selfhood. As Gómez Bravo indicates, it was the Cardinal Primate of Spain himself who in the mid-1930s had imagined a form of ‘divine totalitarianism’, which could hold at bay the ‘disintegrative’ effects of modern life. But in the end, the mechanics of trying to implement it would depend on a modern process – a war-derived process of mass mobilization.

Indeed, there is an even greater paradox here in that by the 1950s it was precisely the Catholic Church's backing of Francoism which smoothed the way for its acceptance into the institutional and political order of the Cold War West, because the Catholic dimension was perceived internationally as counterbalancing the Franco regime's ‘awkward’ origins – its civil war victory delivered by Axis/Nazi intervention and Francoism's subsequent unstinting collaboration with the wartime Third Reich. In short, the Church's role in Francoism was seen as mitigating the regime's political assimilation to Western Europe, even though it was an undefeated Nazi ally. Franco's underlying advantage after the Second World War remained of course Spain's strategic/geopolitical value to the West, and particularly to the US, in the emerging Cold War order, something which was carefully tended by Franco's heavily spun discourse of ‘first hour’ anticommunism. But we should never underestimate how much Francoism's instrumentalization of Catholicism counted in a Western establishment dominated by social conservatives whose marks of political identity included religious faith as standard, whether in Washington or among the Christian democratic leaderships of postwar Western Europe. Franco's way was substantially eased thereby, allowing Spain by the mid-1950s to be accepted institutionally and politically as a client regime of the United States. Just as the Francoist cupola understood the utility of Catholicism as a form of social disciplining domestically, they also ‘performed’ it internationally in full and shrewd knowledge of its efficacy: as Franco's civil war comrade-in-arms and political alter ego, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, would remark, ‘the Catholic business [la cosa católica] goes down very well in Washington’ (Gómez Bravo).

The key role played by Franco's Church in implementing the state's project of mass repression and in extending social disciplining is more or less axiomatic among specialist historians in Spain. But it remains a source of contention among some Anglo-American scholars working on twentieth-century Spain/Francoism who continue to see the Spanish Church as an institution operating quite separately from the state. While this is a complex subject, it also seems probable that a good deal of the ‘trouble’ here is not about an abstract historical complexity but rather about the politics of the Western Cold War. What we have already described of the system of social and political control which continued to operate under Francoism long after 1945, outside as well as inside the prisons, constitutes forms of totalizing – or totalitarian – control, things which, by definition, the ideology of the Cold War still, even now after its putative end, holds to have been the ‘unthinkable’ within the post-1945 West.

Thus, we might reflect further on whether the ‘trouble’ around Francoism more generally, and the curious persistence of antiquated representations of it, also derive from this same Western Cold War grid, even now. The political West's political legitimacy continues to rest on its victory over one totalitarianism (the Second World War/Nazism) and its fight against another (Cold War/Stalinism), so it follows that sustaining that legitimacy required, and requires, the domestic workings of Francoism to remain unseen. Saliently here, we know that an acute awareness of what was happening in Franco's prisons was pivotal to how the emerging New Left in Italy, France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere in the late 1960s came to perceive the deep forms of political and social coercion present in Western Europe beneath the consumerist surface (Thorne). Historical memory was key here, but in a direct, embodied form of inter-generational friendships and personal connections. These impelled both the work of intellectual critique but also a world of ground-level activism, as Jessica Thorne's article elucidates in this special issue. It was precisely anarchist prisoner networks inside Spain, in the shape of civil war veterans (among other younger generations of anarchist prisoners), who through their own lives linked Francoist Spain straight back to its Nazi-enabled origins. They also served as a powerful reminder that in the 1960s Franco's prisons were still militarized and run by secret decree and his security forces (police and army) regularly deployed an arsenal of abuse – forms of physical and psychological torture in gaols, police stations and elsewhere – whose existence was regularly denounced in the Western media as the singular marks of identity of the eastern bloc security states. Nor was a broader social surveillance absent from 1960s and 1970s Spain, even if it was to an extent inflected by cultural norms that were different, say, to those in the GDR. But police informant networks existed in Spain just the same: we should always bear in mind that it has been (and still is) the continuing censorship of Francoist police records – as well as of institutional prison documentation – by Spain's successor state which eclipses this awkward history, that is, if such records have not by this point already been destroyed. But even if they have not, then they are buried ever deeper by the day through a seemingly endless extension of privacy/data protection legislation.

Francoist realities were also firmly present in the European New Left's thinking through of the politics of decolonialization. The accent there, especially from their old-guard anarchist interlocutors, was on Franco's Spain as a ‘colony’ of (a now increasingly informal) Western imperialism, symbolized by what was for the dictatorship the economically lifesaving bilateral pact agreed with the US in 1953 and periodically renewed thereafter. Its vast social and cultural consequences, as well as economic ones, in those areas where the US set up its military bases are nowhere more acutely portrayed than in the rapportage-cum-photo essay produced in 1962 by Juan Marsé, one of twentieth-century Spain's most important novelists – an essay which was unpublishable inside Spain at that time and which for various reasons would only be published, posthumously, in 2020. ¹⁰ At the start of the 1960s, under commission from Ruedo Ibérico (the exile Spanish Republican publishing house founded by anarchist veterans in Paris), Marsé travelled the broad southern coastal fringe/inland margin of Spain, westwards from Malaga. The zones he traversed were those of bleak and desperate outward migration. In the environs of the US naval base at Rota, the harrowing poverty of the non-migrating poor also lay revealed in strange cultural encounters between colonized and the colonizers (US military personnel and their families) which played out serially under Marsé's humane but acutely forensic gaze. Although the left's critiques of the 1960s did not articulate it explicitly, the migrants Marsé depicts were the deep product of Francoism's political and economic model of developmentalism in which the mass rural egress of the poor was itself a form of colonial politics. Francoist Spain, unlike neighbouring Salazar's Portugal, which was still possessed of a rich external empire, was forced to look inwards to extract value. The migrant train was, then, also the endpoint of Franco's battlefield war, begun when his colonial army acted as bridgehead to block major agrarian reform in Spain's ‘deep south’ – and thus the migrations of the 1960s were as much enforced as those of the 1940s had been. Many of the southern migrants were bound for the banlieue of Barcelona as fodder for the accelerating industrial ‘miracle’, where they would on occasion be ministered to by the ‘“good women” of the Francoist upper middle classes, [who arrived] as if missionaries into the colonies’ (Graham, ‘When Was the War in Spain?’) at these segregated margins, devoid of schools or any forms of integrative welfare or training. Here the dictatorship was content simply to deploy the police to maintain the ‘social peace’ of Francoism, now no longer felt to be threatened by any living memory of the levelling reforms under the 1930s Republic, but yet still by an immense weight of poverty unfolding.

This was the underside of the neoliberal models of developmentalism which dominated later Francoism. As the buoyancy of the 1960s economy gave way to the beginnings of the recession of the 1970s, the regime was increasingly using not only the ordinary criminal law, but also expanded forms of preventive detention against that part of migrant labour which could not ‘make it’ on the new urban frontier (or which was now also returning from the shrinking economies of northern-tier Europe). The dictatorship no longer viewed them as ‘unruly’ population material to be sculpted as compliant subjects, but simply as ‘waste’ to be controlled and warehoused in the gaols in order not to threaten the ‘social peace’ on which the dictatorship's political legitimacy had always been staked. By this point, then, Francoism was coming to deploy prisons in line with a model then emerging across Western Europe (much earlier in the US), and which is now fully established in post-Franco Spain, as it is across the West (Graham/Lorenzo Rubio, Lorenzo Rubio).

But if 1970s Francoism had mostly relinquished its will to sculpt so evident in the 1940s, it had no less a desire to control, which we can also see in the persistence of a classic Social-Darwinist framework throughout. For example, the child trafficking which had begun under direct state auspices in the 1940s, where the babies and young children of women prisoners were removed to be adopted by affluent families in the orbit of the regime, would continue throughout the dictatorship, as after it, in a privatized form whereby religious personnel, conservative lawyers close to the regime and other well-connected and interested parties continued to traffic children in largely the same way. These were now the babies of poor rural-to-urban women migrants, and while economic gain loomed large, there remained a powerful ideological charge among the perpetrators. ¹¹

We can of course find not dissimilarly abusive social policies and practices in constitutionally democratic Western countries where coercive welfare and forms of gender-sculpting were far from absent in the later decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, there are obvious parallels between Francoism's ‘social peace’ and the preferred – and reigning – forms of conservative social order ‘imagined’ elsewhere in the West, whether in southern- or northern-tier countries. In this ‘elsewhere’ they tended to operate via a range of less overt (if no less structurally violent) socially disciplining mechanisms, whether religious or psychiatric. But these too were present in Franco's Spain, including the wish to ‘contain’ unconventional forms of gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, it was the parallel deployment in Spain of preventive detention (imprisonment in a camp or a ‘specialist’ gaol) to control these things, as still occurred in the 1970s and 1980s – both during and after the formal end of the dictatorship – which certainly looks at first sight as if it might constitute a ‘throw-back’. ¹²

But the point about Francoism, and perhaps the crux of what makes it difficult for comparative Europeanists to see as a ‘whole’, is precisely the time fractures, or disjunctures, which are consubstantial with it. What defines Francoism as a project is its hybridity: its permanent – and terrifying – abuttal of the ‘archaic’ and the transformative, across forty years. Indeed, it deployed the ‘archaic’ in order to make the new. The dictatorship never ceased looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. We could, then, see Francoism as ‘another name for the attempt to bury in perpetuity the possibility of a civil society, of any society beyond raison d’état, and as the will to guarantee an order where the state is always incarnated in military values and society always subsumed in a militarized order’ (Graham). Encoded in Francoism's DNA were the ferocious practices of the militarized public order deployed during Spain's long-running monarchy (war?) of 1874–1931. But no less encoded was what had been born subsequently in and through the radicalizing crucible of civil war, across 1936–1939 – i.e. a modern, mobilized, populist Francoist movement which had emerged bottom-up as a mass support base, had played a key role in the state's vast political repression, and which was in the process further constructed and ‘sculpted’ by the new state. Although this support movement was to some extent demobilized by economic changes from the late 1950s, it was thereafter always kept available – through the application throughout of preferential (protectionist) economic measures – as a populist reserve, what Franco himself once called ‘the claque’.

The Francoist order was an extreme version of what Zygmunt Bauman called the twentieth-century European ‘gardening state’, with its raison d’état of iron population control. But for the Franco coalition there was a particular paradox: it had sought to enact total control over the mass of its population in the name of an older, fixed order of ‘sacred’ social and political hierarchy, yet it had to accept massive change as the price of the dictatorship's own political survival (because the state bankruptcy that loomed at the end of the 1940s would have finished it). Francoism thus oversaw a process of urban demographic revolution that it seems to have believed was ultimately reversible, while, in the day-to-day, necessitating more and more modes of social repression and surveillance in search of ‘total control’, even though this repression never assuaged Francoism's core fear of losing control – thus it emerged as a form of permanent security state.

Francoism's temporal dislocations, which are usually signalled as ‘Spanish’ in other genres, and probably most famously of all in Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown [Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios], depict what was most particularly Francoist about Francoism – a regime that ‘began’ ‘out of time’, in that it remained fascist throughout the 1940s, long after the ‘classic’ European fascisms had been defeated in external war, just as it remained totalitarian for far longer, yet positioned firmly within the political West. (The fact of Francoism never being militarily defeated is of course also key to the difficulty of exorcizing its state legacy inside twenty-first-century Spain, and probably further afield too, among the present-day European ultranationalist right which lionizes Francoism.) But if the Franco dictatorship began its life ‘behind’, it ended ‘ahead’: for it bequeathed to post-transitional Spain forms of neoliberal polity and technocratic governance which are today seen everywhere in the Western world. In other words, through Francoism, Spain entirely missed out the phase of ‘classic’ governing social democracy which was ending in (Western) Europe at about the same time as Francoism ended. The Social Democratic (PSOE) governments in power in Spain for the decade and a half after the landslide electoral victory of October 1982 were already en route to elsewhere, engaged upon the task of confronting the challenges and managing the effects of the global economic and political transformations which had finally ‘done for’ the Franco dictatorship (Graham/Lorenzo Rubio, Lorenzo Rubio). Yet, to its end, the temporal disjunctures remained: in Barcelona's women's prison (Trinitat) in 1975, the authorities were still exercised by the danger of political prisoners coming into contact with common prisoners (comunes). But this was no longer about a perceived danger of the cross-‘contamination’ of political ideas, as in the 1940s, rather it was now a fear that the ‘politicals’ would give the comunes chapter-and-verse about their rights under employment law, which would make it more difficult for the authorities to make the comunes work double shifts in the prison workshops, as happened whenever an especially large order suddenly came in from a big department store (Graham/Lorenzo Rubio). The ‘authorities’ who enforced this illegal labour discipline throughout the 1970s were not yet, however, secular ones, but rather the lay order of the Evangelical Crusading Sisters (Instituto Secular de las Cruzadas Evangélicas), who during the transitional period of the late-1970s were the infamous subject of repeated complaints and criticism in the press for their physical and psychological abuse of inmates in ways that recalled what had regularly happened in women's prisons across Spain in the 1940s. The Cruzadas did not leave willingly, but in 1978 had their state contract to run Trinitat gaol withdrawn by a government composed of reformist Francoists then negotiating Spain's transition out of formal dictatorship (Lorenzo Rubio).

During this transition of the late-1970s and early-1980s, Spain was once again a liminal zone, as it had been also under the war-besieged reforming Republic of the 1930s, a touchstone for Europe as a whole, pointing to which forms of democratic transformation would be permitted and which not. For its part, the extensive ‘trouble’ and disruption, which Francoism continues to bring to what still tend to be too comfortable and bland readings of post-Second-World-War Western Europe, is a sure sign of its pertinence beyond any ‘national’ history of convulsive change. In sum, Francoism matters to the larger continental history precisely because it does not fit. While Spain was embedded in the West, its ‘postwar’ experience was never part of the Western European social democratic interregnum. Indeed, its very hybridity and discomfiting ‘ill-fit’ now turn out to have been pointing at ‘our’ present, and future.