Helen Graham

Helen Graham here brings together leading historians of international renown to examine 20th-century Spain in light of Franco's dictatorship and its legacy. Interrogating Francoism uses a three-part structure to look at the old regime, the civil war and the forging of Francoism; the nature of Franco's dictatorship; and the 'history wars' that have since taken place over his legacy. Social, political, economic and cultural historical approaches are integrated throughout and 'top down' political analysis is incorporated along with 'bottom up' social perspectives. The book places Spain and Francoism in comparative European context and explores the relationship between the historical debates and present-day political and ideological controversies in Spain. In part a tribute to Paul Preston, the foremost historian of contemporary Spain today, Interrogating Francoism includes an interview with Professor Preston and a comprehensive bibliography of his work, as well as extensive further readings in English. It is a crucial volume for all students of 20th-century Spain.

A new and comprehensive analysis of the forces of the Spanish left —interpreted broadly— during the civil war of 1936-9, and the first of its kind for more than thirty years. The book argues two crucial propositions. First, that the wartime responses (and limitations) of the Spanish left —republicans, socialists, communists and anarcho-syndicates— can be understood only in relation to their pre-war experiences, world views, organisational structures and the wider Spanish context of acute uneven development which had moulded their organisations over previous decades. Second, that the overarching influence that shaped the evolution of the Republic between 1936 and 1939 was the war itself: the book explores the complex, cumulative effects of a civil war fought under the brutally destabilising conditions of an international arms embargo.

Helen Graham explores the origins, nature, and long-term consequences of the exterminatory civil war in Spain, charting the resonant forms of political, social, and cultural resistance to it and the memory and legacy these have left behind in Europe and beyond. Not least is the growing sense of the enormity of what, in greater European terms, the Republican war effort resisted: Nazi adventurism and the continent-wide wars of ethnic and political "purification" it unleashed. In Spain today the civil war remains "the past that will not pass away." The long shadow of the Second World War is now also bringing back center frame its most disquieting aspects, revealing to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians--that in Spain, as in the many other internecine wars soon to convulse Europe, war was waged predominantly upon civilians--millions were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbors.^ Across the continent, Hitler's war of territorial expansion after 1938 detonated myriad "irregular wars, of culture as well as of politics, which took on a "cleansing" intransigence as those driving them sought to make "homogeneous" communities, whether ethnic, political, or religious. So much of this was prefigured with primal intensity in Spain in 1936, where, on 17-18 July, a group of army officers rebelled against the socially reforming Republic. Saved from almost certain failure by Nazi and Fascist military intervention, and by a British inaction amounting to complicity, these army rebels unleashed a conflict in which civilians became the targets of mass killing. The new military authorities authorized and presided over an extermination of those sectors associated with Republican change--especially those who symbolized cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, self-educated workers, "new" women.^ In the Republican zone, resistance to the coup also led to the murder of civilians. This extrajudicial and communal killing in both zones fundamentally made new political and cultural meanings that changed Spain's political landscape forever.