History and memory: a new social dimension
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IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 187
International Journal of Iberian Studies Volume 21 Number 3 © 2008 Intellect Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijis.21.3.187/1
History and memory: a new social
dimension
Julián Casanova Universidad de Zaragoza
Abstract Keywords
The history of the Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship is no longer the exclu- Spanish Civil War
sive preserve of historians, and there are now hundreds of people who wish to Franco’s dictatorship
address this past in political terms and, in the case of the heirs of the victims of political violence
Francoism, ethical terms. This is a new social dimension for history, with testi- history
mony playing the main role. But the most significant events of the Civil War and memory
the Dictatorship had already been investigated previously as the result of
painstaking work by dozens of historians over the last forty years. This article
begins with a brief overview on the historiography of the Spanish Civil War and
the Dictatorship, examines the political violence that they generated and con-
cludes with some remarks on the relationship between history and memory, the
new social dimension of the past that permeates both the debate and political con-
troversy nowadays in Spain.
The Civil War and the dictatorship of Franco are a focus of attention in
Spain at last. The international media are devoting much space to the issue
and many Spanish people seem to be equally concerned. What is happen-
ing in Spain? Why this sudden enthusiastic interest in the recent past, the
Civil War, the dictatorship and its victims? This is a question that has been
raised in recent months by German, Dutch, Belgian, French and British
journalists. Spanish society, they say, is ridding itself of the amnesia and the
‘pact of oblivion’ which gripped it in the first two decades of democracy.
There is some truth in these claims. The history of the Civil War and
the dictatorship is no longer the exclusive preserve of historians, and there
are now hundreds of people who wish to address this past in political
terms and, in the case of the heirs of the victims of Francoism, ethical
terms. Mass graves have begun to be opened up in search of the remains of
victims whose murder was never registered and there are some magnifi-
cent documentaries that unearth the aspects of this past that have been
hushed up the most. This is a new social dimension for history, with testi-
mony playing the main role. But the most significant events of the Civil
War and the dictatorship had already been investigated previously and the
most important questions have now been answered. And this is the result
of painstaking work by dozens of historians who, over the last forty years,
have been conducting constant research in archives and libraries. Without
IJIS 21 (3) 187–202 © Intellect Ltd 2008 187IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 188
1 There is an extensive these documents and books, thousands and thousands of them, we would
bibliographic know very little about this period.1
commentary on the
Civil War in Preston During the first two decades of the transition to democracy, revealing
(2006) and Casanova this brutal past was almost exclusively the work of a diverse group of
(2007). For the long
period of Francoism, historians who uncovered new sources, discussed the various ways of
see Casanova ed. interpreting it and began to compare it with what had occurred in other
(2002). For extremely
useful overviews of societies. These research studies were disseminated among university
essential aspects of circles, academic conferences, in books and specialist journals, and they
this period, see
Moradiellos (2000),
changed and substantially enriched people’s knowledge of this long period
Barciela et al. (2001); of contemporary history in Spain, but their arguments and conclusions
and Gracia García failed to reach a wider public and were of scant interest to the media.
and Ruiz Carnicer
(2001). Summaries of The winning side’s versions became outdated and discredited, mainly
recent research are to because they were poorly argued, with its principal apologists either dead
be found in Sánchez
Recio, ed. (1999), and or retired. With the exception of military history, a sphere in which
in the monographic Francoist authors always felt at home, almost everything that is known
issue devoted to
Francoism in Historia today, over seventy years after the beginning of that conflict, is the result
Social, 30 (1998). either of the work of Hispanists, particularly from Great Britain and North
America, the first to challenge the myths of the Crusade with academic
methods, or of a new generation of professional historians who came to
the Spanish universities at the end of the dictatorship and the early years
of the transition to democracy. There was no ‘war of the historians’ in
Spain, as there was in Germany, because the collective responsibilities
were less intense and less international, and historical revision, with its
lights and shades, meant the almost unanimous rejection of the ideas that
were the cogs of the propaganda machine of the Franco dictatorship.
Changes in historiography
For historians who work in Spanish universities, publish books and conduct
research, this rejection might be said to constitute our distinguishing
mark. While we may argue about the best way of characterising the dicta-
torship, or about memory and oblivion, to name but two of the issues that
have taken up most of our time, almost all of us have rejected the ideolog-
ical baggage bequeathed to us by Francoism, and still defended today by
well-known journalists and right-wing politicians.
Most historians know, and we have proved it, that the Civil War was
not caused by the Republic, neither by its politicians nor by the reds who
wanted to destroy Christian civilisation. Instead, clearly identified military
groups broke their oath of loyalty to the Republic, began a full-flown bid
for power in July 1936. But for this uprising, there would not have been a
Civil War. Other things would have happened, but certainly not this war
of extermination. It was the coup d’état, therefore, that buried political
solutions and gave way to armed conflict. And this counter-revolutionary
coup d’état, whose intention was to halt an alleged revolution, finally ended
up unleashing one. Once the wheels of this military uprising and revolu-
tionary response had started turning, it was only arms that had the right
to speak.
188 Julián CasanovaIJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 189
This war gave way to a long post-war period, much longer than the 2 Gabriel Jackson and
Hugh Thomas
aftermath of any other civil war of the time, in which the victors were published their by
firmly resolved to annihilate the vanquished. An extermination plan was now classic works on
drawn up, was put into practice and did not stop after the Civil War. With the thirties at the
beginning of the
the reds captive and disarmed, and with the passive acquiescence of the 1960s. The only work
western powers who had defeated fascist regimes, Franco’s dictatorship that Raymond Carr
has devoted to the
made sure that its victory was always made evident. It covered the whole subject, The Spanish
of Spain with memorials and dealt out ruthless punishment to the van- Tragedy: The Civil
War in Perspective,
quished, their children and their children’s children. The churches were appeared in 1977.
filled with plaques commemorating those who had ‘fallen in the service of Paul Preston, who in
recent years has dealt
God and the Fatherland’. Conversely, thousands were murdered by the mil- with lesser-researched
itary and fascist terror, and their names were never even commemorated aspects of the Civil
on a humble tombstone. The vanquished were frightened even to claim War, published The
Spanish Civil War
the bodies of their loved ones. 1936–1939 in 1986.
Digging up this past and re-burying the dead with dignity was a long, I have discussed the
type of history that
arduous task. The fiftieth anniversaries of the proclamation of the Republic these Hispanists
and the beginning of the Civil War (1981 and 1986) served in part to and their successors
wrote in Casanova
recover this lost time. One thing became clear after the numerous confer- (1997) pp. 237–251.
ences, gatherings and resulting publications: there was a new generation of For more recent
syntheses, as well
young (and not so young) historians determined to research aspects of this as Preston’s, see
history as well as broader topics within limited contexts, but their work Beevor (2006);
amounted to a great deal of local history and little synthesis. This was not Payne (2004) and
Graham (2005).
surprising because this was the main feature of the new wave of Spanish Outstanding for its
contemporary history. Meanwhile, several British and North American his- imaginative and
narrative quality
torians brought out what could rightly be called syntheses about the is Fraser (1979).
Republic and the Civil War, a historiographical output that continues today.2 Outside the
Anglo-American
When the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War was sphere, the German
commemorated, studies of the far-right and fascism occupied only a very historian, Bernecker
has also contributed
small space in the agenda of Spanish historians. Widespread interest in to this overview of
political and socio-economic events that occurred in the Republican zone syntheses with his
contrasted with the scant serious research on what was known as the book published in
1996.
‘national zone’ and the origins of Francoism. The imbalance seemed
3 The first shot was
important because the events that had been researched so intensely fired by Reig Tapia
occurred in a period of less than three years, while the dictatorship that (1979) with his reply
to Salas Larrazábal’s
put an end to them lasted almost four decades. In addition, and this is no book later expanded
coincidence, while almost no one appeared upset that the misdeeds of in 1986. The first
the revolutionary forces should come to light, plenty of obstacles and bar- substantial studies
were those of Solé i
riers were erected against any attempt to interpret the other – dark but Sabaté (1985);
decisive – side of Spain’s recent past. The first pieces of serious research the work by the
Altaffaylla Kultur
into repression during the war and post-war period began to appear in the Taldea collective
second half of the 1980s, some ten years after the Francoist army officer, (1986); Moreno
(1987); and Casanova
Ramón Salas Larrazábal, published his Pérdidas de guerra. Administrative et al. (1992).
obstacles, closed files and threats: this is what faced anyone who was brave
enough to try and investigate Francoist violence in those decades.3
After the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, the long period of Franco’s
dictatorship was the main focus of many researchers. Stanley G. Payne
History and memory: a new social dimension 189IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 190
4 Payne (1987) and and Paul Preston, the most active Hispanists in the United States and
Preston (1993) are Britain, respectively, became experts in Franco and Francoism.4 A new
good examples of this.
group of historians, mainly from Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia and Aragón,
5 Juliá comp.,
Casanova, Solé i enriched their research with new empirical, theoretical and comparative
Sabaté, Villarroya perspectives. Despite the numerous difficulties in gaining access to certain
and Moreno (1999),
with an extensive sources, and the scandalous fact that Franco’s private archive remains in
bibliography the hands of his heirs and is kept by the far-right ‘Fundación Francisco
providing most of
the information
Franco’, there has been a radical change in the way the history of Francoism
that appears in is being researched, written about and taught.
the next section, The last decade of the 20th century, 60 years after the Civil War and
‘Martyrs, victims
and executioners’. over twenty years after Franco’s death, therefore served to reshape the
history, memory and oblivion of the war and the dictatorship. The past is
now less obscure. Various biographies of Franco, quite a number of books
on the Civil War and Francoism, and a wealth of papers and articles on
the violence and repression in the two zones have appeared. There was
none of this in the mid-1980s, for despite the new democratic and peace-
ful foundations for co-existence, there was a fairly widespread fear of
writing about Francoist violence, and it was very difficult to expose its per-
petrators. A synthesis such as that presented in Juliá’s Víctimas de la guerra
civil could only be published thanks to the wealth of studies on Francoist
violence carried out in the 1990s. Ten years previously, it would have been
impossible. When this book appeared, almost twenty-five years after
Franco’s death, it contained reliable data and solid research from just of
half of Spain’s provinces.5
The acclaim that this book received in the media and its popularity
with the public who bought it in much larger numbers than is usual for
history books, show that there is a living memory of the events that left an
imprint on our forebears. Nearly every book dealing with the topic of the
terror perpetrated by the military uprising, the forces of order, the Fascists,
with the blessing and support of the Catholic Church, has sold out and
run into various editions. Irrespective of whether these books are well or
badly written, and irrespective of the length of their print runs, people
have been keen to buy them, photocopy lists of victims, or pass them around
friends and family. And this has happened from Huelva to Pamplona and
from Aragon to Cáceres.
Thus it seems clear that today, in the first decade of the 21st century,
historians cannot really say that there is a conspiracy of silence over what
constitutes memory and oblivion. Now that there are many research paths
and a large number of collective research projects funded by the Ministry
of Education and the Autonomous Governments, Francoism had become a
privileged topic of study in contemporary Spanish historiography. In short,
we have made ourselves heard where it matters, by means of articles, sub-
sidised research and dozens of publications.
But not everyone perceives it this way. First, because the memory and
the war memorials of the victors in the Civil War still predominate over the
vanquished. Remembering those who were killed by Francoist violence
190 Julián CasanovaIJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 191
through a history book is one thing, but a Vatican ceremony to beatify the
‘martyrs of the crusade’ on a Sunday morning, with a full media turn-out
and a representation of Spanish authorities attending the ceremony, is quite
another. Second, because the powerful, omnipresent media-driven Right
often chooses the theme of the Civil War and Francoism as a means of
offloading their all-embracing resentment against the Left in general, and
the PSOE and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in particular. Most historians
are indifferent to this, but given the influence of the messenger, the message
is often lapped up by large sections of the public. This is the shadow cast by
the bloody victory of the Francoists in the war, the 40 years of dictatorship
and the complicated transition.
Martyrs, victims and executioners
The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history and in memory for the way
it dehumanised its adversaries and for the horrific violence that it gener-
ated. If we go by the meticulous research carried out in the last few years,
there were at least 150,000 victims who paid with their lives off the bat-
tlefield: close to a hundred thousand in the zone controlled by the military
rebels and somewhat fewer than sixty thousand in the Republican zone.
Statistics apart, we are fully aware of the principal manifestations of this
terror in the ‘two cities’, one ‘heavenly’, the other ‘earthly’, as evoked by
the Bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Pla y Deniel, quoting Saint Augustine.
The involvement of the church in the theatre of operations, far from reduc-
ing the violence, increased it, blessing it on the one hand and stoking even
more of the popular rage against the clergy that had been kindled wher-
ever the military uprising had inflicted defeat.
The repression dealt out by the military rebels was of a selective nature
from the outset. The first to fall were the political authorities, distin-
guished Republicans and political and trade union leaders. They were
public figures whose names appeared in the papers with their addresses,
including people who, in their capacity as civil governors and mayors, had
relatively recently attended ceremonies, meetings and even parties with
the military personnel who later ordered their liquidation. They were also
intellectuals, professionals, small businessmen, members of the middle
classes who had attained political, cultural and social standing largely
through the Republic. They were killed not to serve as a lesson to their fol-
lowers, as is sometimes said, but to overthrow the model of society and
system of freedoms that they defended. There were political, but also social
values involved, although both victims and executioners came from the
same social background. It was pure political repression: Queipo de Llano
had already said as much in November 1936, when the cleansing was
well under way: ‘Spain cannot be reconstructed until the entire political
rabble is swept away.’
These sacas (being ‘taken out’) and paseos (being ‘taken for a walk’)
ended the lives of most of the political authorities and party leaders of the
Frente Popular coalition. Mayors, provincial government presidents, city
History and memory: a new social dimension 191IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 192
council representatives and hundreds of holders of political posts were
killed in this way, dumped in meadows, outside towns or against cemetery
walls. The fury of the army and Falangists was particularly aimed at the
Frente Popular coalition deputies elected to parliament in February 1936.
A report drawn up by the secretariat of the Congreso de los Diputados, pub-
lished on 22 August 1938, stated that 40 had been murdered and 12 were
either prisoners or ‘missing’ in ‘rebel territory’. This was not a bad haul,
considering that most of the 263 deputies in this coalition were elected in
provinces and cities in which the military rebellion had been put down. Of
those killed, 21 were socialists, 2 communists and the rest Republicans.
Eighteen belonged to Andalusian provinces and five to Galicia, a region in
which leftist and nationalist politicians were wiped from the map.
As well as civil governors, Frente Popular deputies, political, intellectual
and professional elites, this selective repression also included a considerable
number of the leaders and militants of workers’ organisations; some, also
well known, had gone to the same informal gatherings and meetings as
these republicans and some were even related to them; others, the major-
ity, were separate from these elites because of their radical workers’ views
and their hatred of the class system.
Socialists and anarchists, communists, UGT and CNT union members
fell like flies. Officers, Falangists, bosses, owners and conventional society
settled old scores with them, fed up as they were with workers’ disputes,
revolutionary threats, their social aspirations and their agrarian reforms. In
general terms, the repression was a great deal more systematic and there
was more of it in places where social conflicts had been most intensive –
areas where socialist trade unionism or anarchosyndicalism had been
consolidated and in those places where the Frente Popular had won in the
February 1936 elections.
This wave of extermination also caught thousands of people who had
never been conspicuous for their public actions, or so they thought. For
under this new lawless regime, someone only had to state that such-and-
such a person never attended mass, used to frequent the local party head-
quarters or the ateneo libertario (the social and cultural centres of the
anarchists), had celebrated Republican election victories, or was simply
‘known to be against the Movimiento Nacional’, for them to die. Thus men
and women were ruthlessly chopped down, never knowing why, simply
because they had the misfortune to run foul of Falangist university stu-
dents, or of vengeful landowners who refused the dispossessed even the
right to breathe.
It was a reflection of opposition and confrontation between two worlds,
of the socio-economic and cultural imbalance between the ‘haves’ and the
‘have nots’, between those who had had the chance to acquire culture and
the illiterate. In short, it was a reflection of class repression, from the top
down, accompanied and reinforced by the political persecution examined
earlier, although the additional personal and family rifts, religious, nation-
alist and linguistic divisions, all mean that the more conventional images
192 Julián CasanovaIJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 193
regarding class conflict propagated by some of the more militant literature 6 A synthesis of all this
should be rejected.6 violence in Casanova
(2007), pp. 221–260.
The purge was massive and dramatic in rural communities, where
close personal relationships favoured the burgeoning of old disputes and
passionate family quarrels, mixed with political and class hatreds, and the
thirst for vengeance by landowners cowed by popular threats. Decades
later, many families were yet to discover where their dead were, scattered
as they were in the most unlikely places, until they found their names in
the registry office and cemetery lists published in scholarly studies. Others
have been less lucky, deprived of this sentimental and symbolic satisfaction
because their dead were never registered.
They were also dark days for many women, countless numbers of
whom were killed, although in no province did the number of executions
reach as much as ten per cent of the total. Above all, they suffered humil-
iations ranging from having their hair shorn to sexual harassment, as well
as being given castor oil laxatives or being forbidden to show their grief
through mourning. There were women who had to open their doors to
Falangists at night, and tell the murderers where they would find their
absent husbands and sons. Thousands of widows and orphans, who had
lost their parents and husbands in the prime of life – most of the murdered
were between nineteen and forty years old, according to the most compre-
hensive studies – were left with their own lives shattered, and bearing the
stigma of being related to the Republican dead.
In a wave of violence unprecedented in the history of Spain, Falangists,
requetés, citizen militias and volunteers were the most visible manifestation
of the rightist mobilisation facilitated by the military uprising. All these
reactionary sectors accompanied the army in carrying out the terror;
and while it often left the cleansing work to such paramilitary groups, it
was the army that was in charge of the violence. It declared martial
law, assumed full authority over public order, and delegated ordinary
justice to the military. During these early months, its commanders and
officers never put a brake on a repression, controlling it at all times,
despite the appearance of unrestrained hatred that accompanied many
sacas and paseos.
In the Republican zone where the military uprising had failed to mate-
rialise or had been put down, the situation was repeated, with those con-
sidered to be oppressors liquidated in their thousands during the summer
of 1936. And as historians have proven, there was an immediate angry
reaction against the military rebels, who were seen as being directly
responsible for what was happening, as well as an extremely swift, angry
protest against the clergy. Being the most easily attainable target at the
beginning of the breakdown of social order, they went through a living
hell. Burning a church or killing a priest was the first thing that was done
in many villages and towns where the overthrow of the military uprising in
July 1936 unleashed a swift and destructive reaction. ‘It was the satanic
hatred of the Godless against the City of God’ concluded the then Bishop of
History and memory: a new social dimension 193IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 194
7 I have provided a Salamanca, Enrique Pla y Deniel, in May 1939, in his pastoral letter cele-
synthesis of the brating the ‘triumph of the City of God and the Resurrection of Spain’.
revolutionary
violence in Juliá There are data that clearly confirm this picture. With the exception of
comp. (1999) and Madrid, where the wave of repression peaked in the autumn, most execu-
Casanova (2005b).
tions of military personnel by Republicans took place in the summer of
1936. The rage against the clergy occurred during the same months, in
Madrid as well, and by the end of September 1936, the number of ecclesi-
astical personnel murdered was almost 90 per cent of the total for the
entire Civil War. August was the bloodiest month in many areas of
Catalonia and Aragon, Murcia, Toledo, Badajoz and Castellón.
September was the month with most deaths in the provinces of Alicante
and Valencia, but in Catalonia the number of murders was still very high
in October. There were numerous sacas from prisons in September and
October, with dozens of fatalities, and these were repeated in December
in Guadalajara and Santander, and in January 1937 in Vizcaya. Most of
these actions occurred after 4 September 1936, the date that Francisco
Largo Caballero took over as president of the Government. And the most
significant thing of all, despite the fact that the end of August saw the first
decrees setting up special courts to deal with the crimes of ‘rebellion’ and
‘sedition’ in Republican Spain, was that thousands and thousands of citi-
zens were taken on paseos with no legal guarantees. Of little use to them
was the protection that this legislation was supposed to give.
This ‘ardent’ terror became diluted from late November 1936 onwards,
and until the first quarter of 1939, with the new outbreak of violence by
retreating Republican troops in Catalonia and Levante, which was sporadic
to the extent that there were many places where there were no new murders
at all. This was not because there was no one to kill, as some have sug-
gested, for the ‘crimes’ and the ‘reasons’ that in July and August 1936 sent
many to their graves, were the same yet given a different treatment by the
Popular Tribunals during 1937 and 1938. The lives of thousands of prison-
ers were saved by the order and discipline imposed in the rearguard by the
political organisations with representation in the governments of Francisco
Largo Caballero and Juan Negrín, namely the Communists, Republicans,
Basque and Catalan nationalists, as well as the UGT and the CNT.
The clergy, right-wingers, the military, professionals and tradespeople,
small businessmen in the textile and footwear trade, Catholic workers
and many farm owners, all ‘individualists’ who opposed collectivisation,
made up the sectors that were most affected by the radical elimination of
the adversary that spread right through the Republican zone. Most of the
almost four thousand who were murdered in the areas of Aragon where
the militias had settled were rich labourers, small and medium business
owners, tradespeople, craftsmen and day-labourers, with a high percent-
age of clergy in the diocese of Barbastro. In Badajoz, Córdoba, Jaén and La
Mancha, the victims were mainly landowners, families of people with land
in the primary sector and owners of industry, members of the aristocracy,
and conservative and right-wing politicians.7
194 Julián CasanovaIJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 195
The conclusion seems clear: the violence was inseparably linked to the 8 The Catholic Church’s
coup d’état and the progress of the Civil War. Symbolised by the sacas, involvement in the
Civil War and its
paseos and mass killings, it served the two sides in their struggle to elimi- conversion into a
nate their respective enemies, whether natural or unforeseen. On the Crusade may be seen
in Casanova (2005a),
Right, it was an essential part of the ‘glorious National Movement’, with which also provides
its onslaught against the Republic and the gradual conquest of power, an analysis of
anticlericalism and
skirmish by skirmish, massacre by massacre, battle by battle. On the Left, it the memory in which
also became a basic ingredient of the diversified chaotic response of political the Church currently
holds its martyrs. A
and trade union organisations to the military coup. Contrary to appear- thorough analysis on
ances, this violence was not so much a consequence of the war as the this subject is found
direct result of a military uprising that had from the outset gone hand in in Raguer (2007).
hand with unpunished murder and the coup de grâce. The military uprising
was a strategically designed plan which, in the places where it failed, was
met by a sudden armed response against the main players and those con-
sidered to be their material and spiritual brothers-in-arms. While carrying
out this extermination, the rebels were also given the inestimable blessing
of the Catholic Church from the very beginning. The clergy and sacred
objects, however, were the prime target of popular rage, of those who took
part in defeat of the military rebels and who lead the ‘cleansing’ under-
taken in the summer of 1936.8
In the 21st century Spain, the Catholic Church is the only institution
to keep the memory of the Civil War alive, the only institution to keep per-
petuating the memory of its martyrs with more than just remembrance
ceremonies and monuments. The Church has plenty of reasons to remem-
ber the almost 7,000 lay and ordained priests who were murdered
between July 1936 and March 1939. But all this anticlerical violence was
matched by the equally murderous fervour and enthusiasm displayed
by the clergy in areas where the military uprising was successful. The
extermination policy begun by the military rebels on 18 July 1936 was
supported with warlike ardour by conservative sectors, landowners, the
bourgeoisie, bosses, ‘people of integrity’ and pious, daily mass-attending
Catholics, who categorically abandoned the defence of law and order. Most
of the clergy, led by the bishops, not only hushed up this wave of terror but
condoned it and even collaborated ‘body and soul’ in the cleansing. It was
God’s implacable and necessary justice that spilled the blood of the ‘Godless’
in abundance, in order to ensure the survival of the Church, the preserva-
tion of traditional order and the ‘unity of the Fatherland’. Yet the havoc
wrought by the Republican persecution of the clergy, was manipulated by
the Church to constantly evoke the memory of murdered martyrs and
boost its emotional impact among the faithful. The rituals and myths fash-
ioned around these martyrs gave the Church even more power and pres-
ence among those who were to be the victors in the war, wiping out any
trace of sympathy for the vanquished, and kindling the clergy’s passion for
revenge over many years to come.
A decree by the Head of State dated 16 November 1938 proclaimed
that henceforth 20th November would be a national ‘day of mourning’ in
History and memory: a new social dimension 195IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 196
9 Aniceto de Castro memory of the execution of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the
Albarrán (1938), fascist Falange Española, on that day of 1936, and established ‘with the
p. 33.
prior agreement of the Church authorities’ that on the walls of every
parish church there was to be an inscription with the names of their
fallen, either in the present Crusade, or as victims of the Marxist revolu-
tion. This was the origin of the placing of commemorative plaques to ‘the
fallen’ in churches. And although the decree did not stipulate it, all these
inscriptions were headed by the name of José Antonio, a sacred fusion of
those who had died for political and religious causes, all of them ‘martyrs
of the Crusade’. As Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the senior canon of
Salamanca, wrote, all victims of the ‘Russian savagery’ were religious
victims, not just the clergy: ‘the most prominent Catholics, the most pious
figures, the most evangelistic ‘right-wingers’, in short, all those whose
martyrdom exclusively involved religious hatred and persecution of the
Church’.9 The other dead, the thousands and thousands of murdered
Republicans and non-believers, did not exist because they were not regis-
tered or the cause of their death was falsified, for which the bishops and
priests bore major responsibility.
Once the war was over, the victors settled their scores with the van-
quished by reminding them for decades of the devastating effects of the
killing of the clergy and the destruction of sacred objects, while they drew
a thick veil over the cleansing they had undertaken in the name of the very
God that pious and honest people continued to worship. The upheaval
caused by anticlericalism served to cover up the religious extermination
and gave rise to the false idea that the Church only supported the military
rebels when it felt harassed by this violent persecution. Anticlericalism
and the adversary’s violence were always the perfect excuse for the
Church to dodge its responsibility.
Nor was it enough to perpetuate the memory of its martyrs with cere-
monies and monuments. They had to be venerated, a move supported by the
Francoist powers but blocked by the Vatican under Popes John XXIII and
Paul VI. As we know, this changed with John Paul II, who on 29 March
1987 beatified three Carmelite nuns from Guadalajara, murdered on 24 July
1936. From then on, the previously halted beatification processes were
speeded up, and many others added. Several hundred have now been beati-
fied, all of them rebel victims of the Republicans, except for nine clergy mur-
dered earlier during the workers’ revolt of October 1934 in Asturias, who
were first beatified in April 1990 and subsequently canonised in November
1999. These processes have treated everything that happened in Spain from
1931 to 1939 as religious persecution, and pointed the finger at the Second
Republic, a democratic regime drawn into a war by a military coup, as if it
were principal cause and instigator of anti-clerical violence.
Furthermore, the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy feels that the number
of beatified ‘martyrs of the crusade’ is insignificant and is urging many
more to be venerated: the nearly seven thousand ‘martyred’ clergy and some
three thousand lay persons of both sexes, who were activists in Acción
196 Julián CasanovaIJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 197
Católica and other religious organisations. Over sixty years later, the Church
still backs the views of Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the strong apologist for
the rebellion against the Republic and the holy war.
By opening and reopening beatification processes, the Catholic Church
is attempting to turn into something heroic and glorious a past that was far
from it. However many martyrs it beatifies, the Church will never rid itself
of its ‘body and soul’ involvement in the extermination of ‘wicked Marxists’
and the ‘red rabble’ that the military rebels and ‘people of integrity’ imple-
mented from 18 July 1936 and continued for years under Franco’s ‘lasting
and sustaining’ peace. Despite the changes that have occurred in society
and within its own organisation, the Spanish Catholic Church is still an
institution entrenched in its privileges, an earthly power that fails to recog-
nise its blindness to the true nature of Spanish society during almost all of
the 20th century. Its failure to comprehend the problems of the dispos-
sessed social classes, the fact that it clung to its traditional position and
fought against a multitude of Spanish people it considered to be its enemies,
meant that these in turn considered it their enemy. The Church went on
the offensive, turning religion into politics and politics into religion, and by
force of arms re-catholicised those it had not been able to convince by
preaching its message from the pulpits. Well may the Church continue
beatifying its ‘martyrs of the Crusade’. Voices from the past will always
remind it that, as well as a martyr, it was also an executioner.
As we know, the official end of the war on 1 April 1939 did not put a
stop to violence. It saw the end of the political and class struggle, the par-
liamentary system, the lay Republic and of revolutionary atheism, all
these demons interred by Franco’s armed victory under divine protection.
With the reds captive and disarmed, Spain began a new era, a new dawn,
which was to see the end of this ‘unclean’ history of political pluralism, lib-
eralism and foreign philosophies. The elimination of the vanquished
opened up broad political and social opportunities for the victors and pro-
vided them with vast benefits. It was, in short, a purge with wide-ranging
consequences, which dismantled the culture and social foundations of
the Republic, the labour movement and secularism. The destruction of the
vanquished and the benefits resulting from victory in the war formed the
basis of the power of Francoism, on which Franco and the victors built
their own particular regime.
In the post-war period, the destruction of the vanquished became the
absolute priority of the Francoist army, particularly in the last, eastern
provinces to be won. Death was unleashed with total impunity, the same
impunity that had guided the massacres undertaken by the military rebels
since July 1936. Thus began a new period of mass executions, prison
and torture for thousands of men and women. Almost four thousand
were shot in Catalonia and five thousand in the Valencian provinces,
although many of the leading Republicans and left-wingers from this
broad Mediterranean strip were able to flee to France. In the small
province of Albacete alone, there were 1,026 executions by the military
History and memory: a new social dimension 197IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 198
10 The figures are between 1939 and 1953. In the Andalusian city of Jaén, 1,280 executions
based on research were registered up to 1950. In the western half of the province of Badajoz,
conducted by the
historians appearing there were 935 murders in 82 towns up to 1945. In the Eastern cemetery
in the tables drawn of Madrid, 2,663 victims were buried in the first six years of the post-war
up for Juliá comp.
(1999), pp. 411–412, period.
with the war and Vengeance also continued in the zones occupied from the start of the
post-war executions
separated. As well as insurgency by the military rebels and in those conquered during the war.
the bibliography In Aragon, a region split in two by the war, and whose Republican eastern
appearing in this
collective work, I
zone had fallen to Francoist troops in March 1938, almost one thousand
have also used recent people were shot in the post-war period. There were 710 executions in
studies by Souto Malaga and 1,100 in Granada, despite the fact that the paseos, the summary
Blanco (1998); Prieto
Jiménez (2002); executions without trial or prior safeguards, had already sent thousands of
Martín Jiménez people to their graves in the summer of 1936 and, in the case of Malaga,
(2000); Rilova Pérez
(2001) and Espinosa from February 1937 onwards.
(2003). See also The collapse of the Republican army in the spring of 1939 meant that
Molinero, Sala and
Sobrequés ed. (2003). hundreds of thousands of prisoners were sent to improvised concentration
camps that were scattered over the Spanish landscape. In late 1939 and
throughout 1940, there were over 270,000 prisoners, according to official
sources, a figure that constantly fell in the following two years because of
the thousands of executions and deaths from illness and starvation.
Total or partial data available show that in 33 provinces alone, over
35,000 executions were recorded in the post-war period. True, these 33
provinces were part of the Republican zone throughout most of the war,
but there are still no reliable figures for Vizcaya, Asturias, Badajoz, Toledo,
Santander or Madrid. Mention should also be made of hundreds of cases of
violent death due to arbitrary killings, unregistered in military records,
particularly in the spring of 1939, and the thousands who died in prison.
The data available from thirteen provinces show that 4,663 prisoners died
in the post-war period from hunger and disease. The conclusion, pending
new research, seems clear: at least 50,000 people were executed in the
decade following the end of the war, without counting the thousands of
deaths caused by hunger and disease in the various prisons.10
The social dimension of the past
Uncovering all these overwhelming facts about the victims of the Civil War
and Francoist violence has sparked bitter debate in Spanish society in
recent years. As a consequence of the discovery of this hidden past, two new
phenomena have appeared: first, an unknown social dimension of memory,
almost always misnamed ‘historical’ memory. Descendants of the tens of
thousands of the dead – their grandchildren more than their children –
asked themselves what had happened, why this history of death and
humiliation had been covered up, who had been the executioners and, in
those cases in which the victims had not been identified or were presumed
missing, where they were buried.
However, this list of outrages committed by the military rebels and by
Francoism also brought about a reaction from well-known journalists,
198 Julián CasanovaIJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 199
right-wing propagandists and amateur historians, who resurrected the
same old arguments of Francoist manipulation: it was the Left, with its
violence and hate, that started the Civil War, and what the Right and
‘people of integrity’ did, with the military coup in 1936, was in response
to ‘Popular Front terror’. Thus, all the complex, painstaking explanations
of historians now boil down to two questions: who started the war, and
who carried out the most cold-blooded killings. Once again, propaganda
is replacing historical analysis. It is the long shadow of Francoism, a
renewed form of vengeance years later. There is nothing new in this neo-
Francoist, revisionist propaganda, but it addresses, with its standard argu-
ments, October 1934, the red terror, anticlericalism, Paracuellos, the
International Brigades, checas and Soviet dominion.
The arms used by this propaganda are diverse and powerful. First, there
are the pseudo-historians, those whose job is to transmit in a new format,
with books carefully crafted for dissemination, the old Francoist argu-
ments that never served anyone but the ultra-Right and those nostalgic
for the dictatorship. To acquire a new audience for their game, they need
to proclaim to all that the history that we as professional historians have
presented in recent decades is retaliatory, false, serving only the interests
of the left-wing political parties. Theirs are accounts based on secondary
sources, for they have no respect for data and facts that do not fit their
arguments. Furthermore, their conclusions are presented as original by
the aggressive marketing of their publishers, who tend to highlight their
courage in taking a lone stand against the ‘intellectual dictatorship’ of
university-educated historians. Finally, at the third level of this propaganda
strategy, are the journalists and the media’s talking heads who flatter and
applaud their books and opinions, and insult and slander anyone holding
an opposite view.
Nonetheless, the propaganda and aggressive marketing techniques of
the media do not in themselves explain the great public acclaim and vast
sales garnered by some of these books on the origins, myths and crimes of
the Civil War, a success never achieved by professional historians. Proof of
this success is the fact that in Spain there are still many people who owe
to Franco and his dictatorship their social status, their religious beliefs or
ideological commitments, their family links with victims of revolutionary
violence, who obtained vast material and spiritual benefits from his long
rule without suffering any persecution whatsoever. They adapted to
democracy and adapted their memory to the new times, yet suddenly, as if
a new Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy had occurred, they were reminded of
their past and of the executioners who were resting in peace by history
books on military and fascist violence condoned by the Church, by docu-
mentaries and the search for common graves of those killed by Francoism.
This is why they want to read and listen to another history, the one
they had always known: that Franco and his dictatorship were beneficial
for Spain, because they rid her of something much worse, the red tyranny,
and because, in the final analysis, following the suffering that was to be
History and memory: a new social dimension 199IJIS_21_3_02-Casanova-090002 4/18/09 11:23 AM Page 200
11 To see the scope of expected from the war that was caused by the Republicans, the dictator-
these neo-Francoist ship brought development, modernisation, roads and dams. They do not
arguments and
discussion on them care that historians, economists and sociologists present solid, meticulous
by just a few Spanish evidence to the contrary, that the Civil War was caused by a violent coup
professional
historians, see d’état against the Republic and that the war and the subsequent dictator-
Moradiellos (2004); ship were disastrous for Spain’s history and her harmonious development.
Espinosa (2006);
and Reig Tapia For these new propagandists, it is not a question of explaining history, but
(2006). ‘Persuasive of how to reconcile the memory of one faction with the other, two different
lies’ (‘Mentiras
convincentes’) is the
pasts, two ways of rationalising them, by remembering some things while
term I used to denote forgetting others, by once again airing Francoist truths which, as the
this falsifying of leading experts on this period have shown, are substantial historical lies.
history in an article
for the newspaper, El Most professional historians who provide positive, well-reasoned con-
País, 14 June 2005. tributions for the debates on this traumatic past, who stimulate new
research and bring it to lecture halls and academic conferences, do not
seem to be interested in wasting energy on criticising these new Francoist
versions of history, unlike their reactions to those who fashioned the first
version of this same history: Joaquín Arrarás, Ramón Salas Larrazábal or
Ricardo de la Cierva. But perhaps we ought to react, because any lie that is
not refuted becomes a simple form of manipulation. There are two ways of
avoiding this: using the work of distinguished historians to combat propa-
ganda, and trusting in the meticulous study of history for a better under-
standing of mankind, even though we may still be beset by persuasive lies
for some time.11
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Contributor details
Julián Casanova is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza.
His publications include Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain: 1931–1939,
(Routledge 2005); La Iglesia de Franco (Ediciones Crítica, 2005); and República y
guerra civil (Ediciones Crítica, 2007), English edition forthcoming with Cambridge
University Press. He is also the editor of Morir, matar, sobrevivir. La violencia en la
dictadura de Franco (Ediciones Critica, 2002) and co-author of Víctimas de la guerra
civil (Temas de Hoy, 1999). He has been Visiting Professor at several prestigious
Universities in England, USA and Latin America. Contact: Departamento de Historia
Contemporánea, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009
Zaragoza, Spain.
E-mail: casanova@unizar.es
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