Forging New Instruments of Mass Social Control from Traditional Materials: The Disciplinary Role of Catholic Church Personnel in Franco's State Prison System of the 1940s and 1950s
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Francoism's repression of its civilian population was based on a massified prison system and parallel system of punitive parole. At their core were religious personnel who fulfilled key disciplinary functions for the new state. By the latter stages of the civil war (1936–1939), church and lay Catholic personnel had already produced the legal justifications to underpin the repression. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where a politically mobilized society was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (before and during the war). This church–state symbiosis in Spain was already explicit by the early-twentieth century. After World War Two, as before it, Franco's ‘National-Catholic’ dictatorship deployed religious personnel speaking an antiquated language of ‘re-Christianization’ and ‘religious conversion’ to impose a modern, state disciplinary project – i.e., the sculpting and close surveillance of its population. Given the Church's full participation in this ‘divine totalitarianism’, it was paradoxical that by the time of Cold War ascendancy in the mid-1950s, it would be the same Church providing an alibi for Franco's state – in which judicial and penal systems remained militarized, and the everyday lives of its population closely controlled – to reassure Western interlocutors, who were themselves mostly socially conservative and/or Christian-Democratic, of Francoism's ‘non-totalitarian’ nature.
期刊介绍:
European History Quarterly has earned an international reputation as an essential resource on European history, publishing articles by eminent historians on a range of subjects from the later Middle Ages to post-1945. European History Quarterly also features review articles by leading authorities, offering a comprehensive survey of recent literature in a particular field, as well as an extensive book review section, enabling you to keep up to date with what"s being published in your field. The journal also features historiographical essays.