1st Edition

Mass Killings and Violence in Spain, 1936-1952 Grappling with the Past

Edited By Peter Anderson, Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco Copyright 2015
    234 Pages
    by Routledge

    242 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Historians have only recently established the scale of the violence carried out by the supporters of General Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. An estimated 88,000 unidentified victims of Francoist violence remain to be exhumed from mass graves and given a dignified burial, and for decades, the history of these victims has also been buried. This volume brings together a range of Spanish and British specialists who offer an original and challenging overview of this violence. Contributors not only examine the mass killings and incarcerations, but also carefully consider how the repression carried out in the government zone during the Civil War - long misrepresented in Francoist accounts - seeped into everyday life. A final section explores ways of facing Spain’s recent violent past.

    Introduction: Grappling with Spain’s Dark Past  Peter Anderson and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco  Part One: Rebel Violence  1. The Psychopathology of an Assassin: General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano  Paul Preston  2. Francoist Antifeminism and the Violent Reversal of Women’s Liberation, 1936-1951  Francisco Cobo Romero and Teresa María Ortega López  3. Scandal and Diplomacy: The Use of Military Tribunals to Keep the Francoist Repression Afloat During the Civil War  Peter Anderson  Part Two: Violence in the Republican Zone  4. Political Violence in the Republican Zone: Repression and Popular Justice in a City Behind the Lines: Málaga, July 1936-February 1937  Lucía Prieto Borrego and Encarnación Barranquero Texeira  5. ‘The Civilisation That Is Being Forged Amid the Thunder of the Cannons’: Anticlerical Violence and Social Reconfiguration: July - December 1936  Maria Thomas  Part Three: Repression and Resistance in the Postwar Period  6. ‘Loving the Punished’: The Prison System and the Church in the Post-War Period  Gutmaro Gómez Bravo  7. The Struggle Continues: Everyday Repression and Resistance in Post-War Francoist Spain  Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco  8. The Long Nocturnal March: The Spanish Guerrilla Movement in the European Narrative of Antifascist Resistance (1936-1952)  Jorge Marco  Part Four: Facing the Past  9. Remembering Spain’s War: Violence, Social Change, and Collective Identity Since 1936  Michael Richards  10. Challenging Impunity in Spain Through the Concept of Genocidal Practices  Antonio Miguez Macho

    Biography

    Peter Anderson is lecturer in twentieth-century European history in the School of History at the University of Leeds.

    Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco is a lecturer at the University of Granada.

    "These 10 essays by some of the leading and/or up-and-coming British and Spanish scholars in the field fit within the growing challenge to the triumphalist, Francoist interpretation of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-75)...While the chapters are built on primary sources gleaned from the growing number of records and accounts of atrocities emerging after 1975, the result is a highly politically charged volume that comes down hard on everyone from the egomaniacal General Quiepo de Llano, who signaled his bloody ways long before betraying the Republic at the start of the Civil War, to the British diplomacy that kept Francoist repression afloat, and the Catholic Church’s role in buttressing the Francoist discourses on prisons, prisoners, and the possibility of redemption through bloody repression. Summing Up: Recommended." - E. A. Sanabria, University of New Mexico, CHOICE

    “All contributors are worthy exponents of renewed trends in the analysis of state repression and social attitudes towards violence and offer innovative themes and approaches…there is little doubt that this book makes a very important contribution to its field.” - Daniel Oviedo Silva, Nottingham University, UK, European History Quarterly