Michael Richards: From war culture to civil society: Francoism, social change, and memories of the Spanish Civil War

How Fascism Ruled Women. Italy 1922-1945, (Berkeley, CA, 1992) and Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, (Cambridge, UK, 1987). For Germany, see Martin Broszat, ‘A Plea for the Historicisation of National Socialism’, in Peter Baldwin (ed), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate, (Boston, MA, 1990), 77-87. See also Broszat’s debate with Saul Friedlander, ‘A Controversy about the Historicisation of National Socialism’ in Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), 1-47.

7 Julián Casanova, ‘Guerra civil, Lucha de clases?, el difícil ejercicio de reconstruir el pasado’, Historia Social, 20, (1994), 135-150.

8 Santos Juliá et al, Víctimas de la guerra, (Madrid, 1999).

9 Juan Díez Nicolás, 'La mortalidad en la guerra civil española', Boletín de demografía histórica, III, 1, (March 1985), 52-3.

10 It is estimated that around 50% were women and children. A.A.Bravo-Tellado, El peso de la derrota 1939-1944: la tragedia de medio millón de españoles, (Madrid, 1974); Vicente Llorens, El exilio español de 1939, (Madrid, 1976), 99-112.

11 Anuario Estadístico, (Madrid, 1942), 1099. It is doubtful that these figures tell the whole story, however. The official average prison population for the period 1930-4 was around 9,000. By the end of 1942, according to the authorities, almost 125,000 remained in prison.

12 See Louis Stern, Beyond death and exile: The Spanish Republicans in France,1939-1955, (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Carmen Alcalde, Mujeres en el franquismo: exiliadas, nacionalistas y opositoras, (Barcelona, 1996), 15-30.

13 See Roig, Noche y niebla; Eduardo Pons Prades, Morir por la libertad: españoles en los campos de exterminio nazis, (Madrid, 1995).

14 ‘Social history’ in the sense of human history, underlining the role of experience, though this alternative terminology is not unproblematic.

15 Merely in secondary education, for example, see the Ley de la Jefatura del Estado sobre reforma de la Enseñanza Media, pronounced by Nationalist Minister of Education, Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez, Boletín del Estado, 23 September 1938, on ‘the definitive extirpation of anti-Hispanic and foreignizing pessimism, child of apostasy and of the hateful and lying black legend’. Also, Andrés Sopeña Monsalve, El flórido pensil. Memoria de la escuela nacionalcatólica, (Barcelona, 1994); Gregorio Cámara Villar, Nacional-catolicismo y escuela. La socialización política del franquismo (1936-1951), (Jaén, 1984). There were also a large number of books and pamphlets produced by the Falangist Movimiento and its off-shoots for women and youth, the SF and the Frente de Juventudes, as well as courses on ‘formación política’ and ‘formación familiary y social’ (for women and girls), most of which included sections about Franco and the war.

16 On the struggle over 2 May (1808) as a symbol during the conflictual years of the Republic, see, eg, General Jorge Vigón Sueirodiaz, ‘Dimensión nacional del 2 de mayo’, Acción Española, 52, 1 May 1934, who saw it as superior (more faithful to the Spanish temperament) than the workers’ holiday of 1 May, stressing ‘catholicism, monarchism, individualism, violence and rebellion: Spain without foreignness’. See also local commemorations following Nationalist occupations during the Civil War. Eg, ‘La Fiesta Nacional del 2 de Mayo en Málaga’, Boinas Rojas, 4 May 1937, 9.

17 Eg, Julián Grau Santos (born in 1937): ‘Gradually it was instilled in me and I always believed that Spain had won the war against foreign enemies of our historic greatness’. Rafael Borràs Betriu, Los que no hicimos la guerra, (Barcelona, 1971), 481.

18 Eg, Luciano de la Calzada Rodríguez, ‘El espíritu del 18 de julio, como realidad histórica y proyección hacia el futuro’, in Publicación de la Cátedra “General Palafox”, de Cultura Militar, La guerra de liberación nacional, (Zaragoza, 1961), 601-643.

19 The meaning of these principles, which were claimed to represent ‘constitutional evolution’, is open to interpretation. They were certainly far from unproblematic, not least since they were based on the idea of a ‘Spanish nation’. The fundamental principles, according to the preamble, are a sharing of a ‘communion of Spaniards in the ideals that gave life to the Crusade’. ‘Unity of Spain’ and of Spaniards was a ‘sacred duty’ (art.1). The ‘national community’ was constituted by ‘past, present and future generations….. subordinated to the common good of the nation’. (art.5). ‘Participation of the people in legislative tasks’ would be facilitated through ‘the family, the municipality and the syndicate’ as ‘organic representation’. All political organization outside this framework ‘will be considered illegal’ (art.8), etc.

20 These laws, which were quasi-sacred texts to regime insiders, were: the Fuero del Trabajo (March 1938), the Ley Constitutiva de las Cortes (July 1942), the Fuero de los Españoles (July 1945), the Ley de Sucesión (March 1947); the Ley de Principios Fundamentales (May 1958); the Ley Orgánica del Estado (November 1966),etc.

21 It is important that the real change was brought about by the Ley de Ordenación Económica (July 1959) - the so-called Stabilization Plan. This was the ‘Decree Law’ for dismantling the autarkic system and liberalising the economy, though its ultimate benefits are debatable.

22 Javier Ugarte Tellería, La nueva Covadonga insurgente. Orígenes sociales y culturales de la sublevación de 1936 en Navarra y el País Vasco, (Madrid, 1998); Cándida Calvo, ‘Franquismo y la política de la memoria en Guipúzcoa. La búsqueda del consenso carlista (1936-1951)’, in Alicia Alted Vigil (ed), Entre el pasado y el presente. Historia y memoria, (Madrid, 1996), 163-182.

23 Victoria Lorée Enders, ‘Problematic Portraits: The Ambiguous Historical Role of the Sección Femenina of the Falange’, Enders and Pamela Radcliff (eds), Constructing Spanish Womanhood, (Albany, NY, 1999).

24 See, inter alia, Ricardo Becerro de Bengoa, La Hermandad de Alféreces y el destino de España, (Cáceres, 1962); Miguel Primo de Rivera y Urquijo, Palabras pronunciadas en el almuerzo ofrecido por Alféreces Provisionales, (Madrid, 1968); Jaime Montero y García de Valdivia, Los retos del presente y las respuestas españolas: Europa hoy, los Alféreces Provisionales, el Movimiento español, (Valladolid, 1970).

25 Franco’s controversial liberal Catholic education minister (1951-56), Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, who became something of a figurehead of political and social reform in the 1960s as director of the influential liberal journal Cuadernos Para el Diálogo, valued his memories of the war among other alféreces provisionales. See Ruiz-Giménez, ‘Guerra y paz en el alma del hombre español’, intervention at the University of Zaragoza, 1959, in Ruiz-Giménez, Del ser de España, (Madrid, 1963), 102.

26 Eg, 25 aniversario de la paz española. El gobierno informa, (Madrid, 1964). Fraga rose to prominence as an associate of the liberal catholic Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez.

27 Jesús Unciti Urniza, the director of Editora Nacional del Ministerio de Información y Turismo. Borràs, Los que no, 98-99. See also, ibid, 27-8.

28 Before becoming Minister, Fraga was Professor at Madrid University and director of the Instituto de Estudios Políticos. Some continuity is visible with the post-war ‘new humanism’ of ambivalent Civil War Falangists. See, for example, Fraga’s favourable view, in his Las transformaciones de la sociedad española contemporánea, (Madrid, 1959), [12], of Pedro Laín Entralgo’s essay, España como problema, (1949, [later published, Madrid, 1956]).

29 Fraga Iribarne, Las transformaciones, 7,8. Fraga was hugely prolific and this is one example of his work chosen because it exemplifies his aim of reconfiguring the official sense of history and control of historic memory. Although he does not talk about the Civil War, this realignment had major implications for contemporary understanding of the place of the war in Spain’s development and in ‘Spain’s memory’.

30 Cf, Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two, (London, 1995).

31 See, eg, Antonio Vallejo-Nágera, Psicosis de guerra: estudio clínico y estadístico, (Madrid, 1942); Juan José Lopez Ibor, ‘Neurosis de guerra’, Actas Españolas de Neurología y Psiquiatría, año III, 1-2, (January-April, 1942), 124, 126, 132.

32 Dictamen de la comisión sobre ilegitimidad de poderes actuantes en 18 de julio de 1936, (Barcelona, 1939); The Second and Third Reports on the Communist Atrocities, (London, 1937); Ministerio de Justicia, Causa general: La dominación roja en España. Avance de la información instruída por el Ministerio público, (Madrid, 1943). The 4^th edition of this last appeared unchanged in 1961 through the Dirección General de Información.

33 This was through the Patronato Central para la Redención de Penas por el Trabajo, which imposed disciplinary labour on thousands of prisoners (both men and women) from 1938, as a means to personal redemption and to a gradual remission of sentences. José Antonio Pérez del Pulgar, La solución que España da al problema de sus presos políticos, (Valladolid, 1939).

34 There was never any homage to Republican veterans even to the modest extent of that paid by the Spanish parliament to International Brigade veterans in November 1996 on the occasion of the 60^th anniversary of their arrival in Spain to aid the government.

35 A part of the emotional appeal of religion and of the rituals (especially Catholicism) is inherently to do with remembering and commemoration. The sense of the family of the Church reinforces the emotional impact of this.

36 The cultural and political significance varied from place to place. Carlos Álvarez Santaló, María Jesús Buxó i Rey, Salvador Rodríguez Becerra (eds), La religiosidad popular, 3 vols, (Barcelona, 1989).

37 Although, because of the extreme polarisation of society and the motivation and opportunity for domination, in post-civil war societies the rhetoric of denial and abnegation is often swamped by state corruption and dubious political habits.

38 On disabled Republican veterans and their struggle to obtain war pensions, see Pedro Vega’s official history of the Liga de Mutilados Invalidos de la Guerra de España, Historia de la Liga de Mutilados, (Madrid, 1981). On labor discrimination, see, eg, Centro Nacional-Sindicalista, Delegado Provincial, ‘Informe sobre el paro – Vizcaya’, 5 October 1939, Secretaría-General del Movimiento, Vizcaya, Archivo General de la Administración, caja 23.

39 Into the 1960s, measures of social justice were associated with Franco’s victory, as acts of charity had been in the early 1940s. Eg, the 1962 commission of the First Nacional Assembly of Mutualidades Laborales presented the Minister of Labour with a ‘placa con el parte de la Victoria de la Justicia Social’ in honour of Franco’s 25 years of ‘Caudillaje’ (leadership). ABC, 2 May 1962.

40 Eg, Jesús Alonso Carballes, ‘La integración de los niños vascos exiliados durante la guerra civil en la sociedad franquista de posguerra’, in Trujillano and Gago (eds), Historia y memoria, p.179. The most common psychic disturbance complained of by half-starved people in working class Madrid in 1941 were apathy in children and (possibly significantly) loss of memory in adults. Many subjects had signs and symptoms of a mild neural or neuromuscular disturbance of undetermined origin. William D. Robinson, John H. Janney and Francisco Grande Covián, ‘An Evaluation of the Nutritional Status of a Population Group in Madrid, Spain, During the Summer of 1941’, The Journal of Nutrition, 24, (1942), 557-84.

41 Eg, William D. Robinson, John H. Janney and Francisco Grande Covián, ‘Studies of the Physical Characteristics of Selected Children in Madrid, Spain, in 1941’, The Journal of Pediatrics, 20, no.6, (June, 1942), 723-39.

42 Eg, Testimony of José Agustín Goytisolo, in J.F.Marsal, Pensar bajo el franquismo, (Barcelona, 1979), 161, and the memoir of his brother, Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado, (Barcelona, 1985), [English edition, transl. Peter Bush, Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, 1931-1956, (San Francisco, CA, 1989), vol.II, 41 and passim. See also Teresa Pàmies, Los niños de guerra, (Barcelona, 1977); also retrospective testimonies (in 1970) of wartime children in Borràs, Los que no hicimos.

43 See Castresana’s most well-known novel, El otro árbol de Guernica, (Madrid, 1967) and the author’s prologue to the imprint edited by Leo Hickey, (London, 1972), p.7. Also Borràs, Los que no, pp.19-20.

44 This distinction is brought out in Paloma Aguilar Fernández, ‘Agents of Memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, UK, 1999), 84-103.

45 On sacred time and space, see Michael Richards, A Time of Silence. Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936-1945, (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 67-74. Borrowing from social anthropology, the cultural-mental effects of temporal and spatial displacement might be viewed through the notion of ‘destructuration’.

46 Eg, Dolores Plá Brugat, ‘La experiencia del regreso. El caso de los exiliados republicanos catalanes’, in Trujillano and Gago, Historia y memoria, 71-91. Also, Jesús J. Alonso Carballés, ‘La construcción de una memoria colectiva del éxodo infantil vasco’, in Cuesta Bustillo (ed), Memoria e historia, 163-193.

47 Eg, Claudio Esteva Fabregat, Industrialización e integración social, (Madrid, 1960), esp. 21-29.

48 Dr José Palanca, ‘Hacia el fin de una epidemia’, Semana Médica Española, 4, 2 (1941), 432.

49 Eg, Manuel Irurózqui, preface to Mihail Manoilescu, Teoría del proteccionismo y del comercio internacional, (Madrid, 1943), xiii-xiv.

50 Alfonso Iniesta, Garra marxista en la infancia, (Burgos, 1939), 267/8/282. On rural schools, Antonio Molero Pintado, La educación durante la segunda república y la guerra civil (1931-1939), (Madrid, 1991), 298-9; 445-7. On the general process of rural decline, see Julio Caro Baroja, Estudios sobre la vida tradicional española, (Barcelona, 1968), especially 253-74; Víctor Pérez Díaz, Emigración y cambio social: procesos migratorios y vida rural en Castilla, (Barcelona, 1971), 13-45; 159-225.

51 Antonio Montero Montero, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España, 1936-1939, (Madrid, 1960); Vicente Carcel-Ortí, La persecución religiosa en España durante la segunda república (1931-1939), (Madrid, 1990).

52 Ecclesia, 1 October 1941. Vocations had declined by 48% in the period 1926-35. Medical doctors appear also to have been a target for revolutionary violence in the countryside. According to the Dirección General de Orden Público, more than twice the number, on average, of priests, Civil Guard officers, judges, and medical doctors were killed in the revolution than other professions. ‘Los asesinatos de médicos rurales’, Semana Médica Española, 55, 30 March 1940, 511-512. These figures presumably do not include purges by Nationalist-Francoist forces during the war, since there is no mention of, for example, factory workers and labourers.

53 Eg, Diario de Navarra, 30 August 1936, 1; 2/6 September 1936, 1/3; El Ideal Gallego, 28 August 1936, 1; El Correo de Andalucía, 5 September 1936; Heraldo de Aragón, 3 September 1936; La Vanguardia Española, 1 August 1939, 1. See also Francisco Morente Valero, La escuela y el estado nuevo: la depuración del magisterio nacional (1936-1943), (Valladolid, 1997); Wenceslao Álvarez Oblanca, La represión de postguerra en León: depuración de la enseñanza, 1936-1943, (León, 1986).

54 Eg, Reconstrucción, Año 1, no.1, 6-16 on the ‘destruction’ and ‘heroism’ of Belchite.

55 Eg, Pedro Altares to Borràs, Los que no, 387.

56 The professed aim was to ensure that sacrifices would not be lost in the silence of the past. However, the popular perception was that the Valle sanctified Franco’s victory rather than the sacrifice of thousands of lives. Only reluctantly, and somewhat in contradiction with the triumphalist rhetoric, were Republican dead permitted a resting place here, although very many families, on both sides, were resistant. Daniel Sueiro, La verdadera historia del Valle de los Caídos, (Madrid, 1976); Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil española, (Madrid, 1996), 116-30. On plans to construct a 'Monument to the Counter-Reformation', see Angel Llorente, Arte e ideología en el franquismo, (1936-1951), (Madrid, 1995), 78.

57 Abdón Mateos, ‘La contemporaneidad de la izquierdas españolas y las fuentes de la memoria’, in Alted, Entre el pasado y el presente, 96. Also Esteva Fabregat, Industrialización e integración, 22.

58 See, for example, the letter of the Civil Governor of the province to the Minister of Trade and Industry, Juan Antonio Suanzes, 21 April 1951, AGA, Presidencia, SGM, caja.72.

59 See Juan Martínez Alier, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, (New Jersey, NY, 1971), esp. 31-32, 234-238; Antonio-Miguel Bernal, ‘Resignación de los campesinos andaluces: la resistencia pasiva durante el franquismo’, in España franquista. Causa General y actitudes sociales ante la dictadura, (Albacete, 1993), 145-159.

60 Though the attempt to hold onto the past went as far as rural immigrants bringing the venerated image of the Holy Virgin, the regional holy patron, to the city with them, (as in Cornellá de Llobregat, Barcelona). See, eg, Esteva Fabregat, Industrialización e integración, 27.

61 See Antonia Muñóz Fernández, 'La emigración en la provincia de Jaén 1900-1955', in Estudios geográficos, 81 (November, 1960), 455-496.

62 ‘María’, 45 years, arriving in Madrid 1952. Miguel Siguan, Del campo al suburbio: un estudio sobre la inmigración interior en España, (Madrid, 1959), 59.

63 See, inter alia, Siguan, Del campo al suburbio; Esperanza Molina, Los otros madrileños, (Madrid, 1984), 15. On the sense of ‘forgetting’, see, eg, George A. Collier, Socialists of Rural Andalusia. Unacknowledged Revolutionaries of the Second Republic, (Stanford, CA, 1987).

64 Angels Pascual, ‘El impacto de la inmigración en una ciudad de la comarca de Barcelona: Hospitalet’, in Antoni Jutglar et al (eds), La inmigración en Cataluña, (Barcelona, 1968), 74. The apparently ‘unifying’ effects of the marketplace are not least of the social changes that ought to be considered.

65 This is the oral history approach exemplified in, eg, Mercedes Vilanova (ed), El poder en la sociedad, (Barcelona, 1986); José Manuel Trujillano and José María Gago González (eds), Historia y memoria del franquismo, 1936-1978, Actas IV Jornadas Ávila, (1994), (Ávila, 1994); Luisa Passerini, ‘Introduction’, Passerini (ed), Memory and Totalitarianism, (Oxford, UK, 1992), 1-19. See also the 3 volumes of Julio Aróstegui (ed), Historia y memoria de la guerra civil, (Castilla-León, 1988). ‘Orality’, however, is also part of the written traces of the past and need not be restricted to spoken interviews.

66 Eg, Carles Santacana i Torres, Victoriosos i derrotats: el franquisme a l'Hospitalet, 1939-1951, (Barcelona, 1994), 113; Borràs, Los que no, 154, 204, 487, 527.

67 See, eg, Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi, Spain. Dictatorship to Democracy, (London, 1979).

68 Borràs, Los que no, 160, 513.

69 Carlos Castilla del Pino, ‘Problemas psicológicos de una generación’, El País, ‘Extra’, 20 November, 1985, 18. See also Luis Martín Santos, Tiempo de silencio, (Barcelona, 1961); Plá Brugat, ‘La experiencia del regreso’, 84-87.

70 Testimony about ‘clausura’, of ‘confinement and sadness’ (‘de una época encerrada y tristísima’): Borràs, Los que no, 83-85, 135, 207.

71 On psychological effects, see, eg, F.Fernández Urraca, ‘En torno al exilio de España en 1939’, Cuadernos Repúblicanos, 1, 1, (1989), 39-40, [originally Triunfo, (May 1971)].

72 Eg, comments to Borràs, Los que no, 248. Forgetting has also been likened to an ‘anaesthetic’ or ‘narcotic’. Passerini, ‘Introduction’, 14. A conscious strategy of ‘forgetting’ pre-supposes that the war was in fact very much remembered. This dialectic is explored in political terms in Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido.

73 Enrique Meneses to Borràs, Los que no, 249.

74 According to Franco, 'the suffering of a nation at a particular point of its history is no caprice; it is spiritual punishment, the punishment which God imposes upon a distorted life, upon an unclean history'. (‘No es un capricho el sufrimiento de una nación en un punto de su historia; es el castigo espiritual, castigo que Dios impone a una vida torcida, a una historia no limpia’). ‘Discurso pronunciado con motivo de la entrega, a los comisionados de Jaén, de la reliquía del Santo Rostro’, Jaén, 18 March 1940, Palabras del Caudillo, 19 abril 1937 – 7 diciembre 1942, (Madrid, 1943), 157.

75 Arturo Pardos Batiste to Borràs, Los que no, 541-2. On the expiation of guilt through suffering in the 1940s and the sharing of guilt and responsibility during the transition to democracy, see Víctor M. Pérez Díaz, The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain, (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 24.

76 By the early 1970s, being ‘left’ or ‘right’, politically, though it remained a guide, did not determine an inevitable position on the subject of the Civil War. (To Fraga, for example, José María Gil Robles, was merely one of the ‘traditionalists’.) But this indicated as much about the extent of social change since the war as it did about the extent of ‘political maturity’.