Mass Killings and Violence in Spain, 1936-1952: Grappling with the Past(Routledge Studies on Contemporary Spain)

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"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 "This brilliant collective volume must be considered essential reading ‘for historians grappling with the Francoist past.' (...) 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." - Rúben Serém, University of Nottingham