the Republicans during the Civil War. Franco would remind the Spanish people: “We did not win the regime we have today hypocritically with some votes. We won it at the point of the bayonet and with the blood of our best people” (Rigby 2000: 73). Violence was also part of the Franco regime’s early ideological framework of National Catholicism, which included a brew of traditional Spanish fare such as Catholicism, the view of the peasantry as the embodiment of national virtues, unification of Spanish territory under one homogeneous culture and a single hegemonic language (Castilian), and the use of violence as a “creative and purifying” force (Richards 1996: 152).
For Franco, an absolute military victory over the Republicans during the Civil War was not sufficient; it was imperative to cleanse the country of the foreign virus of liberalism that had infected the nation. This reflected Franco’s regard for socialism as “a hereditary form of biological degeneracy,” a claim that many on the Republican side regard as evidence that Franco’s aim to eradicate the enemy was “tantamount to genocide” (Treglown 2009: 21).11 Indeed, Franco was in the habit of using the metaphor of Spain as a sick patient in need of radical treatment, which he employed early during the regime in a speech to the nation on December 31, 1939, when he announced his intention to purify Spain of “wicked, deviant, politically and morally poisoned elements … those without possible redemption within the human order” (Richards 1996: 158). The prescription for such a condition, according to Franco, required nothing short of the creation of a quarantined society, one undergoing treatment in isolation and divorced from corruptive behaviors and practices such as those that had afflicted Spain under the Republican period and brought about the Civil War.
Among the most obvious targets of Franco’s post-Civil War policy of purification were the huídos (fugitives), the Republicans who took to the hills rather than surrender to Franco, and subsequently the maquis, the Spanish exiles who joined the French resistance and began to reenter Spain after the end of World War II with the hope of toppling the Franco regime. After Franco’s Nationalist army succeeded in eliminating not only the surviving cadres of the Republican political parties but also “the leaders, middle-rank functionaries, and rank-and-file members of the socialist and anarcho-syndicalist unions as well as members of the liberal intelligentsia,” the huídos were the only source of internal resistance against the authoritarian state (Preston 1995: 230). The maquis began to appear in 1944, when signs of the collapse of the Nazi regime in Germany were becoming apparent, and at least until 1948 remained a considerable irritant to the Franco regime by staging attacks throughout the country, often taking over small localities. Neither group, however, in the end was a match for Franco’s army, which succeeded in eradicating all guerrilla activity by the late 1940s.
The Francoist repression, however, was hardly limited to the huídos, maquis, Republican leaders, and members of the radical left such as the labor movement; the subjugation reached deep into the social fabric of Spanish society. Franco’s ability to suppress the populace was greatly aided by the Western powers’ preoccupation with the advent of World War II, and later with the geopolitical divisions created by the Cold War, which forced Britain, France, and the United States to turn a blind eye toward Spain. It was not until the mid-1950s with the signing of the Pact of Madrid (1953), which channeled American military and economic assistance to Franco in exchange for the right to establish American naval and air bases on Spanish soil, that the West began to reconnect with Spain in an effort to deter the global spread of communism. Such disregard for the fate of Spain and its people under Franco allowed the authoritarian regime to impose harsh policies of political purification without a care for its international reputation.
As with the number of Civil War casualties, the number of Spaniards imprisoned by the Franco regime for political reasons remains intensely debated, with some estimates as high as 400,000 (Preston 1995: 230). The regime’s official numbers are dramatic enough: 270,000 in 1940 and 45,000 more by 1945 (Richards 1996: 158). This vast repression was facilitated by the 1939 Law of Political Responsibilities, a law that was applied retroactively and demanded “economic compensation not only from those who had actually opposed the regime in the Civil War, but also from anyone who had made the so-called ‘National Movement’—or the military rising—necessary” (Ruiz 2005: 5). Such a sweeping legal mandate made virtually everyone who had sympathized with the Republican government—including liberals, teachers, masons, intellectuals, regionalists, labor leaders, and urban workers—a target for prosecution by the Franco regime.
Life as Franco’s prisoner reveals the sinister nature of the Francoist repression. Many Republican prisoners were tortured by military psychiatrists determined to eradicate “the germ of anti-nation, a form of degeneracy that if not cleansed to the last trace would contaminate the healthy body of Spain” (Graham 2004a: 2). Other notable torturers were the nuns running the women’s prisons, the reported site of “episodes of extreme atrocity, of mental and physical abuse” (Faber 2007: 142). Homosexuals became a target of the state after 1954 with the enactment of the Vagrancy and Villainy Act, a law replaced in 1970 by the more repressive Social and Menace Rehabilitation Act, “a fiercely anti-homosexual text that reified the conceptualisation of homosexuality as an anti-social, dangerous activity” (Calvo 2005: 96–98). An untold number of homosexuals (mostly male), or invertidos (inverted) were imprisoned, tortured, and locked in mental institutions as a consequence of these laws.
For many of Franco’s prisoners, captivity turned into outright slavery. “Spain became an immense jail, in which the vanquished were put at the service of the victors,” observes historian José Luis Gutiérrez.12 Approximately 280,000 individuals convicted under the 1939 law were forced to work in the construction of their own jails (such as Carabanchel on the outskirts of Madrid) and concentration camps (such as Merinales in Andalusia) and massive public infrastructure projects (such as the Guadalquivir Canal, at the time the largest Spain had undertaken, built to provide irrigation to the region of Andalusia). Prisoners were also conscripted to work in the iron foundries of Bilbao and the mines of Asturias, and to erect monuments glorifying the authoritarian regime. According to historian Antonio Miguel Bernal, by 1941, approximately 10 percent of Spain’s male labor force were in jail.13 Many prisoners, grouped into twenty-four industries and 602 trades and professions, were parceled out to the private sector, especially to construction companies. Legitimizing this system of forced labor, from which the cash-strapped state benefited generously, was the Catholic notion of “expiation through suffering,” which allowed prisoners to redeem their political sins by offering their labor to the nation for free. “Redemption, when it was offered, could only come through labor,” remarked Franco in a December 31, 1938, speech (Richards 1996: 158).
Separating prisoners from their children was another common form of Francoist punishment. Auxilio Social (Social Aid), the largest social welfare agency in Franco’s Spain, is directly responsible for taking many prisoners’ children and placing them in state orphanages, where they were mistreated physically and mentally. According to one account (Faber 2007: 142), Auxilio Social officials separated some 30,000 children belonging to the “reds” based on the theory by military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nájera that “these children should be saved from the degenerative environment of their leftist parents.”14 This “totalitarian scheme,” according to one study (Cenarro 2008: 41–50), employed welfare programs to incorporate individuals into the state “not as social subjects entitled to social rights” but as “members of a hierarchically ordered state-controlled national community,” and was grounded in a “mix of eugenicist theories and Catholic ideologies whereby pro-republican attitudes were seen as the result of the lower classes’ polluted social and ideological background.”
The Basque Repression
Also targeted by the Francoist repression were those opposed to Franco’s myth of a culturally homogeneous Spain—key among them Basque nationalists. Until its very end, the Franco regime treated the Basque Country as occupied foreign territory or a colonial outpost. Underscoring this “occupation” were laws that applied exclusively to the Basque territory in an attempt to stamp out separatist sentiments. A case in point was the banning of the public
