Abstract
This brilliant collective volume must be considered essential reading ‘for historians grappling with the Francoist past’ (p. 11), comprised as it is by contributions from established leaders in the field, and highlighting the work of the most promising scholars now emerging. Preston’s opening chapter is a chilling biography of a mass murderer, General Queipo de Llano, who was responsible for over 45,000 deaths in southern Spain during the Civil War. Preston vividly portrays Queipo’s pathological ‘tendency to violence’ (p. 25), including his personal involvement in the assassination of fellow officers and his repeated incitement to rape and murder. The chapter is indispensable for anyone attempting to grasp the sheer brutality of the Civil War in the south. Similarly important to understanding the misogynistic nature of the Franco regime is chapter 2, which summarizes the myriad forms of repression, ranging from necrophilia to exorcisms, visited upon women who dared to embrace gender equality. Catholic theology played a key role in the portrayal of the victims as ‘degenerates’ that needed to be ‘punished’ in order to attain ‘redemption’ (pp. 62–63), a theme that is further explored in chapter 6. Another pillar of Francoist repression, military tribunals, is investigated by Peter Anderson in chapter 3. Anderson reveals that court martials were, in fact, instruments to keep Francoist repression ‘afloat’ (p. 72), while giving it a legal veneer in an attempt to seduce foreign public opinion to its cause. On this topic, the author successfully exposes the lethal consequences of British realpolitik vis-à-vis Spain.
Part III is devoted entirely to post-war Francoist repression. In chapter 6, Gómez Bravo substantiates the argument introduced previously (chapter 2), that ‘Catholics made a decisive contribution in the development of penal policy by propounding the idea that prisoners of war should be treated as common criminals in need of moral regeneration’ (p. 137). Crucially, the author demonstrates that Francoist repression did not conclude with the defeat of the Axis in the Second World War. Indeed, the Church continued to exert social control over one million former prisoners. Sentenced to extreme poverty and internal exile, daily life became a living hell for paroled individuals, a point further developed in chapter 7, where Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco demonstrates that ‘both the culture of victory and the socioeconomic repression was also enforced from below in everyday life by the regime’s followers’ (p. 156). While Francoist ‘martyrs’ were mourned and supporters permitted to amass fortunes in the black market, ‘dogs, cats and rats became part of the diet of the poorest’ (p. 166). Understandably, many joined the anti-Francoist guerrilla movement, especially escapees from prisons and concentration camps. These individuals are the subject of Jorge Marco’s impressive overview of ‘the first and the last of the antifascist resistance movements in Europe’ (p. 174). Marco reveals the common roots of the conflicts that plagued Europe between 1936 and 1945 and demolishes the ‘European metanarrative of the Resistance’ that conveniently ignores the fact that ‘antifascism was victorious in Europe whereas it was defeated in Spain’ (p. 188).
Only two chapters (4 and 5) are devoted to Republican repression. The editors adequately justify this option since ‘Francoist repression was far more intense, longer lasting and more state directed than the violence in the Republican zone’ (p. 14). What might be lacking in quantity is compensated by quality. Chapter 4 traces the courageous efforts of the Republican authorities to end repression in Málaga. Indeed, most victims were murdered in the initial months of the war, when state authority was severely challenged. Moreover, the authors establish a plethora of motivations for the violence and conclude that ‘the selection of victims was in no way arbitrary’ (p. 101); a view corroborated by Maria Thomas in her magnificent reflection on what she terms the ‘anticlerical revolution’ (p. 114). Thomas expertly dismantles Francoist explanations that emphasized the supposedly irrational nature of anticlericalism. Last but not least, Thomas also demonstrates that members affiliated to all Republican political parties (as well as apolitical individuals) participated in the revolution, and that ‘it would be both unwise and impossible to assign one concrete, ideological grounded meaning to the revolution’ (p. 115).
The concluding part of the book focuses on the ‘memory wars’ that still plague Spain today, opening with Mike Richards’s examination of the traumatic consequences of decades of unilateral Francoist propaganda and the regime’s ‘construction of an official memory’ (p. 197). Richards asserts that ‘State-sanctioned violence and repression is … the necessary point of departure’ (p. 200). Of particular importance is his study of ‘intimate violence’ and the ‘privatisation of power’ (whereby individuals gained access to ‘the Franco state’s coercive apparatus’, p. 200) that ravaged rural Spain and triggered mass migration to the cities. The concluding chapter focuses on the evolution of the concept of genocide that came to exclude political activists, the primary victims of Francoist terror. Antonio Miguez Macho’s evidence reaffirms a constant theme of the book, namely that ‘the rebel[s] … carried out a planned programme of state-controlled violence from the very start of the conflict’ and ‘resorted to violence to reorganise their own society and to smash entire groups of people’ (p. 217). Above all, Miguez Macho identifies and denounces the final stage of this policy: the denial of the crimes and the claim that sociopolitical stability can only be attained through impunity.
All things considered, Peter Anderson and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco edited an outstanding overview of repression in Spain between the start of the Civil War and the defeat of the anti-Francoist guerrilla movement that ultimately succeeds in ‘challenging the Francoist interpretation of the past and in many cases cast new light on that past’ (p. 3).