{"title":"Anarchist Prisoner Networks in Franco’s Spain and the Forging of the New Left in Europe","authors":"Jessica Thorne","doi":"10.1177/02656914231214933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231214933","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the little-known but formative networks developing across the 1960s between anarchist political prisoners in Franco's Spain and emerging activists of the European New Left. As social change accelerated, these prisoners broke with the out-of-touch anarchist leadership-in-exile to connect with a new generation of activists inside and outside Spain. The article uses prisoner correspondence and prisoner-aid bulletins to reconstruct these informational networks, and argues they were an important element in the ‘global rupture of 1968’. It posits that anarchist prisoners’ input was a formative influence on how New Left activists came to see post-war Europe as a whole: both looked beneath Francoism's consumerist surface (habitually foregrounded in discussions of it as a Western client regime), to its reconfigured repressive core. The article discusses key discursive shifts by the anarchist prisoners as they sought international support in a new era of decolonization, ‘national liberation’ and the ramping up of the Cold War. In a landscape shaped by Castro's success in Cuba, war in Algeria and the birth of ETA inside Spain, anarchist prisoners and New Left activists alike defined Franco's political prisoners as victims not only of a national dictatorship but also of the Western Cold-War order.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"58 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tirer La Couverture À Soi. PSOE Factions’ Views on French Socialism and the Popular Front","authors":"Aurelio Martí Bataller, Sergio Valero Gomez","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216612","url":null,"abstract":"The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) has been interpreted as exceptional among its European counterparts because of its internal divisions, radicalization and the impossibility of reaching cross-cutting agreements. This article demonstrates how, during the 1930s, the PSOE's evolution went hand in hand with other socialist parties in Europe, especially with the Section Française de l’International Ouvrière (SFIO). In particular, this article focuses on the views of the Spanish socialist factions – prietismo and caballerismo – on the formation and development of the Popular Front in Spain and France. The press of these factions – El Socialista, Claridad and Leviatán – had a similar role in the evolution of both parties. Furthermore, this study points out how the different factions of Spanish socialism used the French experience to legitimize their positions during the first part of 1936.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"26 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139151692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prisons in Transition? The Prison System During and After the Political Transition from the Francoist Dictatorship","authors":"César Lorenzo Rubio","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216301","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the chronology of change in the Spanish prison system, especially during the transition from the Francoist dictatorship (1975–1982). It indicates how the incarcerated population had come to reflect Francoism's management of social change (including via an increasing use of preventive detention). By the early 1970s, political activists represented a minority of those incarcerated, although a minority that had grown steadily again from the late 1960s. The article discusses relations between the different groups of inmate, the rapidly-deteriorating conditions inside the gaols, and the emergence in the early transition period (1976) of prison protests (COPEL) led by common prisoners whose main objective was inclusion in the gaol amnesty then being proposed as part of the exit strategy from dictatorship. The article analyzes the reactive rather than proactive response to COPEL of Spain's transitional governments, composed of reformist Francoists, and the eventual outcome in a prison reform law in 1979. The article assesses the law's limited practical effect inside the gaols, because of severe budgetary restrictions combined with Spain's rising prison population – the latter mirroring developments across Western democracies generally.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"4 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139148706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Critical and Comparative Reappraisals of the Greek Revolution","authors":"George Kalpadakis","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216406","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"33 3‐4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Staying in Control? Youth Reformatories, Social Fears and Social Change Under Francoism","authors":"Amélie Nuq","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216298","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores continuity and change in Spain's reformatories. Looking at legal and normative documentation, we could argue, on the one hand, that the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) found little need to change how the reformatories worked. The juvenile court system, on which they depended, displayed strong similarities to those operating elsewhere in the West, and my empirical study of 2,300 personal and administrative records indicates that the reformatories were always characterized by archaic practices and were chronically underfunded throughout Francoism. On the other hand, after analysing the evolving profiles of adolescents confined under Francoism, we can see the connections with both specific processes of regime-sanctioned change from the end of the 1950s – in particular massive, accelerated, internal rural-to-urban migration – and the goal of the dictatorship of preserving a particular form of social order by maintaining tight control of those sectors of the population it considered a danger (i.e., predominantly marginalized, male adolescents living on the edges of Spain's cities – in the shanty towns ( chabolas) or poor suburbs ( banlieues)). The article also looks at how families from different social classes interacted with the reformatories to achieve their own goals, which overlapped with the dictatorship's while remaining partly distinct.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"87 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139151720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Not Recognizing the Political: Analyzing Franco's Long Dictatorship Through a Genealogy of its Prisoners","authors":"Helen Graham, César Lorenzo Rubio","doi":"10.1177/02656914231214917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231214917","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Francoism through its prison system – from the mass incarcerations of the 1940s (deployed as an instrument of overt political repression) to the gaols of the 1960s developmentalist dictatorship, by which time the majority of prisoners were not activists but the ‘ballast’/‘excess’ of high-speed industrialization/urbanization undertaken without any welfare safety net. The article discusses how the dictatorship conceived of the different groups it incarcerated, how it tried to manage them by ‘divide and rule’ and to what purpose. It explores prisoners’ counterstrategies and the paradox of ‘the political’ in a Francoist prison system which never used the term, yet saw each and every inmate as posing a threat to the dictatorship's ideology of ‘social peace’ (i.e., societal stasis). The article charts a prison transition by the early 1970s, from totalitarian to emerging neoliberal model, the latter still designed to ‘contain’ but no longer to ‘sculpt’ its inmates. Notwithstanding this key change, the article highlights core continuities in the prison system across forty years of Francoism: militarized discipline, rule by secret decree, ‘divide and rule’ strategies, and institutionalized abuse that was endemic and structural.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"346 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139148938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Was the War in Spain? Liberal State, Illiberal Justice in the Twentieth Century","authors":"Helen Graham","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216272","url":null,"abstract":"The article analyzes increasingly militarized state power and public order in twentieth-century Spain, discussing these in the context of other European states’ disciplinary regimes, with their ubiquitous social-Darwinist dimension in an era of accelerating urbanization, industrial change and emergent mass societies. The article offers a dissection of the often problematically opaque term ‘liberal’, arguing that wherever Spain or other twentieth-century European states were positioned on the dictatorial-through-parliamentary-constitutional spectrum, they all came to be ‘gardening states’ (Bauman). Each state's goal was to sculpt its population as part of a nationalist project – nationalism being the norm, whether named as such or not. Francoism is analysed in this framework, as a hybrid war-born political order blending old-style, top-down military control with new forms of populist mass mobilization from below, the latter enabled and accelerated by the war of 1936–1939. The article defines the Franco dictatorship as fascist in the 1940s and totalitarian for far longer, until macro-economic changes – which its cupola believed for a long time need not affect the deep form of Spanish society – hollowed out Francoism's own ideological categories (and its ‘disciplinary’ efficacy), but not its obsession with social control, which it called ‘social peace’.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagining Contagion: Epidemic, Prisons, and Franco Spain's Politics of Space, 1936–1945","authors":"Michael Richards","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216874","url":null,"abstract":"Recent accounting for disease in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War has been contained within study of hunger in the early 1940s. Historians have cited the typhus epidemic which hit Spain between 1939 and 1945 as demonstrating a causal link between widespread semi-starvation and disease. Though important, the focus on hunger risks losing sight of other vital elements in the onset and transmission of typhus, however, as well as the way the epidemic's progress sheds light on population movement as central to the broader social history of the war and its aftermath. By paying close attention to epidemiological records, this article argues that the direct causes of typhus and its vertiginous spread were primarily ideological and spatial. It shows first how the war's victors used the language of political and bacterial contagion to claim spuriously that the wartime Republic was responsible for the epidemic. It then demonstrates how the intense confinement on a huge scale of those linked to the Republic was at the root of the disease. Transmission depended on this mass imprisonment and on the increased circulation of families to support those in captivity. Finally, typhus influenced the social imagination of the Franco regime and its anxiety about hygiene, prisons, and control of the movement of the urban poor.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"37 3‐4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"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","authors":"Gutmaro Gómez Bravo","doi":"10.1177/02656914231214932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231214932","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"231 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139152629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}