IN THE NAME OF THE MARTYRS

MEMORY AND RETRIBUTION IN FRANCOIST SOUTHERN SPAIN, 193645

Peter Anderson
University of Bath ABSTRACT This article explores how the Francoist victors of the Spanish Civil War (19369) remembered their dead. Eschewing a top-down approach alone, it also looks at the reception and production of memory from below. In this way, the article shows how many of the Francoist bereaved both came to identify with and gained solace from the regimes message that it was involved in a sacred struggle against centre and left political groups. Moreover, many ordinary Francoists came to believe that taking part in the repression of those from the defeated side could offer a way of honouring their dead. Keywords: Spanish Civil War, martyrdom, sacrifice memory, repression

I speak in the name of our 400,000 brothers martyred by the enemies of God. Ramn Serrano Suer, 1938 The dead demand justice against those who destroyed justice. Francoist priest, 19391

INTRODUCTION
In December 2007, the Spanish parliament placed the popularly known Law of Historical Memory on the statute book. This legislation pledges state aid to support efforts to identify mass, unmarked graves from the Spanish Civil War (19369). These burial sites hold primarily the remains of some of the more than 150,000 supporters of the Spanish Second Republic (19319) killed behind the lines by the victorious Francoist side.2 Article 15 of the law also charges public officials with a duty to oversee the removal of monuments to the Francoist dead. Many of these remain in place as a result of General Francos long rule between 1939 and 1975 and the tacit agreement not to rake over the past that followed his regimes demise. The article also threatens those who refuse to co-operate in this task with the loss of state funding.3 The debate over the law stirred strong feeling among many within the ranks of the conservative Popular Party, who argued its clauses served only to rekindle the hatreds of the Civil War period.4 By contrast, many who had campaigned hardest for a memory law felt
Address for correspondence: Dr Peter Anderson, Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK. E-mail: P.Anderson@bath.ac.uk

Cultural and Social History, Volume 8, Issue 3, pp. 355370 The Social History Society 2011 DOI 10.2752/147800411X13026260433077

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the legislation fell a long way short of the mark, particularly because it placed no direct duty on the state to locate graves, exhume bodies and identify victims.5 Despite these difficulties, large voluntary movements such as the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, with strong support bases among the grandchildren of the victims, continue to evolve and take the initiative in exhuming graves.6 This article takes a different starting point and argues that removing Francoist monuments, and particularly those that commemorate the fallen from the victors side, runs the danger of obscuring from view one of the most important ways in which many at the grassroots came to identify with the regime.7 In particular, the form in which the Francoist dead were remembered as heroes or martyrs who had sacrificed their lives to purify Spain of its Republican enemies struck a deep chord with the regimes support base and offered much solace.8 Similarly, the explanation that the sacrifice made by the Francoist dead to free the country of the red criminal horde would gain its true meaning and fulfilment through a programme of retribution also chimed with many of the regimes grassroots supporters. For Francoists this reckoning would both continue and honour the martyrs work of purification. It would also convey a sense of purpose and meaning to many of the sudden deaths experienced by bereaved supporters of the regime. Moreover, because Francoist memory portrayed Republicans in general as inherently criminal, it provided the language and imagery Francoists from below could use to participate in summary prosecutions of their opponents. In turn this allowed them to achieve their own sense of retribution. Accordingly, by exploring how Francoists at the local level both received and helped produce this Francoist message we can complement important studies of official Francoist memory that have often taken a top-down approach and reconsider the idea that Francoism and its repression were imposed upon Spanish society.9 We can also see how Francoist monuments form part of the long-hidden repression that the activists working to exhume bodies and rid public space in Spain of the former regimes commemorative relics seek to expose.

CONFLICT AND IDEAS OF MARTYRDOM

By understanding death as a sacrifice to regenerate Spain and insisting that the gift of the fallen would gain fulfilment with the punishment of the Republican enemy, Francoists turned the ideological goal of defeating centre and left political forces into a sacred task. Accordingly, the starting point for understanding the meaning that bereaved Francoists gave to their losses lies in the depth of ideological and social conflict that afflicted Spain. This grew particularly acute after the First World War. At this time several factors came together, among which the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia stood out to Spains middle and upper classes as a chilling portent.10 The post-First World War period witnessed a mushrooming of left-wing unrest across Spain that seemed to confirm their fears. Barcelona, for instance, had become Europes most unionized city and suffered the continents highest number of deaths during the violent industrial disputes that unsettled labour relations there.11 Conflict also rocked Spains southern rural areas in the years of high inflation that

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followed the close of the war.12 For its part the Spanish Church felt increasingly besieged by the inroads being made by secularism and grew more anxious as both its wealth and its hold over society steeply declined.13 In 1923, the radical right seemed to have won the moment when a coup brought General Primo de Rivera to power. In the end, however, the Primo de Rivera regime (192330) failed to build a mass party and actually gave a fillip to the Socialist Party.14 This only made groups on the right more fearful still and some among their ranks began to harden their outlook. Indeed, under Primo de Riveras wing a number of thinkers flourished who saw their now emboldened opponents as implacable enemies. Writers such as Jos Pemartn argued that liberal democracy, by basing itself on universal suffrage, inevitably led to communism. The horror this prospect triggered among some sections of the right comes across in the intellectual Ramn Maeztus comment that the world had become involved in a struggle between civilization and communism. Figures like Maeztu gave a particularly Catholic infusion to this struggle by arguing that all those who supported the Church and civilization formed the true Spain, while the enemies of civilization could not be part of the nation and so were labelled the anti-Spain.15 With the coming of the Second Republic in April 1931, some sections of the right began immediately to plot the overthrow of those they represented both as tyrants and as the embodiment of the anti-Spain.16 Their arguments began to take firmer root across the right from February 1936, when the centre-left coalition of the Popular Front won power at the ballot box, leaving the right railing at its inability to hold onto power against its united opponents. In this context, in the spring of 1936 attitudes on the right stiffened considerably and large numbers of fresh recruits surged into rightwing parties such as the Carlists and the Falange which stood committed to the violent overthrow of the regime.17 The Carlists formed a group of traditionalists who had kept their political culture alive in part by honouring their dead as martyrs to their cause.18 For its part the Falange, widely regarded as the Spanish fascist party, spoke of the need for a holy crusade of violence to purge Spain of impure influences. At Falange meetings the names of comrades killed in the political violence would be read out to an accompanying cry of Presente.19 For Falangists it was the political aspiration of their fallen comrades that they tried to preserve in their collective memory, and so it became incumbent on the survivors to carry on the political work for which they had died. Such ceremonies echoed those of other European movements. In Italy, for instance, commemoration of the fascist martyrs also made use of the roll call and the shout that the dead comrade remained present.20 Equally, the belief that the work of those who had sacrificed their lives should be continued underlay Mussolinis 1919 cry that he would defend the dead.21 For the Italian historian Emilio Gentile the cult of the fallen played a central role in Mussolinis efforts to mobilize the masses through rituals which could inspire people with both mystical and political ideals.22 Much of the power of such ceremonies came out of the extraordinary experience of mass death in the First World War that gave ideas of sacrifice and resurrection a profound resonance for millions who served in the

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trenches as well as those who lost loved ones at the front.23 Moreover, in the crisis years that followed the First World War, Italian fascists presented the violence they inflicted upon socialists as part of a crusade against Bolshevism to save the nations soul. In this way, death in the struggle against political enemies became a form of regenerative sacrifice. Equally, the funeral ceremonies subsequently staged for the dead helped forge a new religion of nationalism in which violence was seen as a means to purify and redeem the nation.24 Unlike Italy, Spain did not participate in the First World War. However, many of the movements on the Spanish right were profoundly influenced by French, German and Italian right-wing groups and remained deeply marked by the experience of the First World War. Mussolini, for instance, funded a number of radical groups in Spain. Equally, the ideas of right-wing political organizations such as Accin Espaola drew inspiration directly from French far-right groups.25 Factions on the right in Spanish politics moved further to the right as the political temperature began to rise through the spring of 1936. This meant they now began to accept many of the ideas propounded by far-right European movements. Even the party ostensibly committed to respecting the Republican constitution, the Confederacin Espaola de Derechas Autnomas (CEDA), had its own youth groups, the Juventud de Accin Popular (JAP), with a track record of supporting ideas of martyrdom, and in spring of 1936 this section of the movement jumped ship and swelled the ranks of the fascist party.26 With the Civil War in the offing, many Spanish rightists from different organizations found that they could effectively unite against a common enemy and around shared ideas of martyrdom. In addition, the Civil War brought the experience of mass death to Spain both on and behind the lines. In these circumstances many in what became the Francoist coalition found inspiration and solace in the ideas of other European movements already tempered by the fire of war. The stage now lay set for them to represent death in the struggle as a sacred and regenerative act.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

The killing began between 17 and 18 July 1936 with rebellion against the government led by General Mola. This coup suffered an ignominious start when sections of the army and their civilian supporters bungled their effort to seize power rapidly.27 Defeated in major urban centres such as Madrid, Barcelona, Mlaga and Valencia, they clinched success mainly in northern and western Spain. Despite this poor start, desperately needed aid from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany saved the rebels skins and transformed the bodged coup into a brutal civil war of attrition.28 From late September 1936, the rebels came under the leadership of General Franco and his insurgent forces secured total victory in late March 1939. Up to half a million people are estimated to have lost their lives in the conflict, and some writers suggest that the number of civilian casualties exceeded the number of combatants for the first time in history.29 Many of these civilian deaths came through the brutal processes of occupation carried out by rebels and Francoists. By the end of the war in late March 1939, they had cut short the lives of around 100,000 people they identified as supporters of the

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Popular Front. Large numbers died at the hands of death squads, while summary military tribunals, set up with advice from Nazi legal theorists and often trying scores of military or civilian prisoners at a time with little regard to due process, also sentenced thousands to death and tens of thousands more to jail terms of up to thirty years. The close of the war did not bring an end to the killings and in the next ten years victorious Francoists ended the lives of a further 50,000 people.30 Keen not to draw attention to these killings, the insurgents instilled fear and exercised censorship to draw a veil of silence over their programme of terror. By contrast, and to inspire its supporters and bolster its fight with a sense of purpose, the Francoist side made great play of violence in Republican held territory. Events certainly offered a helping hand because the coup the rebels had mounted destroyed policing institutions in the territory controlled by the government. Here many police officers defected to the rebels, while others were considered unreliable or were drafted into the armed forces.31 In addition, in a last throw of the dice to put down the revolt, the government had distributed arms to the masses, which gave a number of irregular elements the opportunity they needed to take matters into their own hands. News of rebel and Francoist atrocities helped drive some of the terror such groups carried out. At a time of mortal danger a number of militia men believed that the government was failing to deal with fifth columnists and that they had to act to root out these enemies. But with the outbreak of civil war, some left-wing revolutionaries operating in government territory believed that the time had now come to build a new society and if necessary members of the old guard would have to be killed.32 Representatives of the Church suffered particularly badly in the wave of violence 4,184 priests lost their lives along with over 2,500 monks and nuns and 13 bishops.33 The Church did not suffer alone, however, and in total in territory controlled by the Republic 55,000 people had their lives taken.34 That said, by the end of 1936 the government had reasserted its control over most of the rogue elements and had substantially rebuilt its policing services.35 We can glimpse the grim reality of these murders on the ground by studying two contrasting areas in southern Spain: the small agricultural village of Pedroche near Pozoblanco in the province of Crdoba, and the city and province of Mlaga. Events in Pedroche cast light on the bloodbath that followed the storming of villages in the Pozoblanco area after rebels against the elected government seized power in the wake of the July coup. Immediately upon recapturing the village in late July 1936, militiamen beyond the control of the local Republican leadership won control of a number of prisoners whom in some cases they went on to murder. In total, they left eighty-four villagers for dead.36 A large number of rightists from the Pozoblanco area were also taken to Republican strongholds in Valencia and Jan where they were put on trial, after which 223 of them faced the firing squad.37 In Mlaga, around 2,500 people lost their lives to a mixture of rough-and-ready militia patrol groups through the summer and autumn of 1936. Some were taken from their homes and killed and others perished when, as prisoners, they were marched from their cells and murdered in revenge for bombing raids on the city by rebel forces. A number were dispatched to the firing squad by Republican tribunals.38 A further 1,182 people suffered arrest and detention, and fifty-

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seven buildings, including many belonging to the Church, were raised to the ground.39 Political activists also took over some businesses and confiscated large amounts of property. In particular these activists trained their sights on Church property.40

MEMORY AND RETRIBUTION

At the national level the Spanish Catholic Church, reeling from its many losses, now threw the bulk of its weight behind the rebels and Francoists.41 The violence sparked by the revolt allowed many rebels to think of themselves exclusively as victims, despite the rebels own wave of killing. At this point much of the substance of Francoist thinking on the purpose of the war and death began to emerge more clearly. In September 1936, for example, the bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Pla y Deniel, described the war as a Crusade for religion, the Fatherland and Christian civilization.42 He justified his choice of terms with the assertion that communists in Spain had killed thousands of people in an effort to exterminate religion and destroy the family. In this sense, he contended, the war formed an international crusade against Russian communism and barbarism and a struggle to defend the civilization of the entire world. He went on to revile those who rejoice in killing, in theft, in destruction and in arson as the incarnation of evil.43 These views soon became stock beliefs both within most parts of the Spanish Church and across the wider Francoist camp. In July 1937, with just a few exceptions, the bishops of Spain issued a collective letter setting out their vision of the purpose and meaning of the Civil War. Here they argued that the rebels had taken up arms to save religious principles from those set on the elimination of Catholicism in Spain and the extermination of the Catholic clergy.44 They went on to argue that the necessity of this revolt had become clear over the summer of 1936 and the premeditated avalanche of destruction of all the pillars of society. In short, because of all this they implored all decent citizens to reduce to impotence the enemies of God who had barbarously destroyed centuries of civilization.45 This line of thinking provided a platform from which to launch eulogies to those who lost their lives in the struggle as martyrs for the Church or as heroes of the nation. As Enrique Pla y Deniel expressed it, against the human degradation of those without God flourished those whose divine love raised them to the sublime levels of heroism and martyrdom.46 Technically speaking, as Gom wrote, only those who died for their faith could be martyrs, whereas soldiers who offered up their lives for the Fatherland could be recognized as heroes.47 In practice, however, members of the Church tended to run the two terms together so that, as Pla y Deniel stated, those who had died for God and Spain could enjoy the merit but not the privilege of being martyrs.48 In this way, the relatively more secular understandings of groups around the Falange concerning the status of their fallen and those of the Church became more easily reconciled.49 By the same token, those who died fighting on the front line and those who perished behind the lines were accorded similar status.50 Across the Francoist movement a demand arose to give meaning to these heroic deaths by honouring and fulfilling the purpose for which they had died by enacting

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retribution. One way this desire found expression was through a body of atrocity literature that grew up during and after the war and which mixed accounts of martyrdom with demands for retribution against the criminals said to shoulder responsibility for the killings.51 In this way, in 1944 the Franciscan monk Antonio Aracil published his own account of killings in the south of Spain in which he described the Civil War as a conflict between Christ and Hell and as a struggle against Marxists who wanted to destroy both the nation and faith.52 Like other works of this genre, his book teems with ghastly stories such as the tale of the government supporter accused of slicing off the ear of one of his victims and parading it around his hometown.53 But in his view the description of such horrors opened the door to the consoling message that these deaths, although painful, gave off a glorious light that cast its splendid beam over those who had survived. All of this meant that it became a duty to remember these martyrs. At the same time he noted that he recognized in the tear-stained eyes of those mourning their dead the desire for justice and punishment for the human abortions who had committed such horror and barbarism.54 Men of the cloth by no means stood alone in expressing such sentiments. Antonio Prez de Olaguer, for instance, a novelist who turned his talents to political advantage by gathering up atrocity stories during the Civil War, provides a striking example. In July 1936, militiamen gunned down both his father and his brother in Barcelona. Rendered distraught by this experience, he went on in 1937 to publish a paperback book priced for the mass market on the red terror in Catalonia. Here he described the pattern of the five bullets that killed his father as reproducing the crucifixion of our Lord. Such thoughts both sent a shiver down his spine and offered him much comfort. Indeed he noted that God is certainly on our side. He also observed that recounting deaths such as that of his father filled people with a sense of purpose in fighting the war in order to finish with the red dictatorship. He added that he felt driven to detail the savage cruelties of the guilty so that we can demand justice for all those complicit.55 Accordingly, in 1938 he published a similar work on events in southern Spain in which he expressed his hope that he would bring the worlds attention to the wave of killings and proclaimed that he would be ashamed of my pen if justice is not done.56 Franco himself made this relationship between memory and retribution explicit in a speech in January 1940. The dictator proclaimed that the deaths of those from the victorious side had delivered Spain from the perpetual tyranny of the barbarians and that these losses could not go without retribution. The victims themselves, Franco implored, demand justice. The purpose of this retribution was clear to the Caudillo: no moral being could refuse these righteous claims for punishment and, importantly, the task of national redemption would not be complete until the horde had been punished.57 From this perspective he could declare in March 1939 that in the future it will be the hundreds of thousands of our dead who will rule.58 The clear ideological tone of these statements presents a challenge. For if they are found to have been widely accepted, they bring into question some of the arguments put forward by scholar Michael Seidman in significant and recent contributions to the social history of the Spanish Civil War. He has argued that during the conflict combatants on the front line began to adopt a live and let live attitude towards their

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opponents and so pushed ideological considerations into the background as they pursued their own self-interest.59 He has also argued that people who denounced supporters of the Popular Front to the Francoist authorities did so for selfish financial reward rather than in response to an ideological drive.60 Indeed, for Seidman consumerism more than any ideological motive underpinned early Francoism.61 As regards those behind the lines, there is some evidence that they exhibited the same materialist attitude that Seidman found on the front line. The Franco regime used its hold over state patronage to encourage civilians to take up its ideas about the meaning of loss and suffering in the Civil War. To this end, a decree of August 1939, for instance, stipulated that compensation could be paid to those who could demonstrate they had been subject to vicious persecution or who had a relative that had suffered, in the words used in the decree, a gory martyrdom. The decree also allowed local civil servants who had been dismissed for rebellion by the Republican government to claim compensation. Bereaved relatives could claim the money if the civil servant had died in violence in the Republican zone.62 Those unwilling to take up the regimes discourse could face ruin. Antonio Ruiz, for instance, a judicial officer in rebel-held Burgos in the early part of the Civil War, reported that if a refugee who had made his way from Republican-held territory has not been tortured by the Reds, at least morally (or if not himself, one of his friends or relations), he remains without a job. According to Ruiz, this led to a competition of woes in which everyone had suffered worse tortures than everyone else, even though they arrived in the best of health.63 Such pressure certainly seems to have exerted a powerful effect. The US journalist Virginia Cowles, for instance, reported that during her time in Salamanca in 1937 she noticed that vilification of the enemy was so extreme that it was almost a mental disease. At the heart of this vilification stood the constant recounting of atrocity stories told by refugees from Republican-held territory. She retained some sympathy, observing that many were in mourning. Despite this, she could not stomach the extreme exaggeration and felt sickened by the fact that anyone who might have refuted the tales would have ended up behind bars.64 It also seems to be the case that the language used to express Francoist memory of the war also provided a means by which the regimes supporters could represent themselves to the new authorities as virtuous victims of the Marxist hordes and authentic members of the national community who deserved reward. At the same time, this presented those from below with an opportunity to settle personal scores. For instance, the chief executive of the civil court in Pozoblanco had fled the town when it had been retaken by Republicans in August 1936. However, he regained his former post by presenting himself to the authorities as having endured a Calvary of infinite suffering during the war when he had sought refuge in the Panamanian legation in Madrid, and by painting himself as a true victim of Marxism because of his loyalty to the Glorious National Movement. By furnishing the authorities with extremely hostile testimony, he also played an important role in securing in a military court the conviction of, and a thirty-year sentence for, the man who had taken over his post in Pozoblanco from August 1936.65 Similarly, the former municipal vet in the nearby village of Torrecampo applied for compensation, claiming that Marxists had killed

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two of his sons and a son-in-law. He also pointed out that he had suffered imprisonment and the confiscation of his property. The mans claim shows the importance grassroots Francoists attached to demonstrating their gruesome suffering and how they related personal torment to reward.66 The same man also played an important role in defining those whom he held to be responsible for his suffering as criminals by making a number of denunciations to the military authorities.67 What consumerist explanations leave out, however, is the emotional and spiritual impact of loss and the way the ideological project of defeating the reds became a sacred task that gave meaning to the most private of experiences such as bereavement. For in fact we possess a great deal of evidence to show that ideas of regenerative sacrifice and demands for retribution that would purge Spain of its enemies found a real echo among the Francoist grassroots. Certainly, the meaning given to death as a sacrifice that purged Spain of its Marxist enemies occurs repeatedly in Francoist funeral services held at the local level. As with other war burials in Europe, these collective funeral services offered emotional catharsis to the bereaved by providing an opportunity for grief to be worked through by sharing loss with others.68 In the city of Mlaga in 1941, for instance, Francoists exhumed their dead from a mass grave and held an impressive funeral ceremony in the august surroundings of the cathedral. Jesuit Father Garca Alonso, who had suffered imprisonment in Mlaga prison and had witnessed fellow inmates being illegally carted out of the prison to be murdered, led the funeral ceremony and imparted the meaning he attached to the deaths of Francoists. In his oration he beseeched the bereaved relatives amassed before him to take comfort from the fact that the deaths they mourned formed a necessary sacrifice to save the country from the atheist and communist revolutionary hurricane which would have robbed Spain of its true essence and would have converted the country into a satellite of Russian Bolshevism.69 Francoists in Pozoblanco also exhumed the dead and then transported them, sometimes great distances, for reburial.70 They then marked the subsequent mass reinterment of their dead with elaborate services that attracted considerable publicity.71 As in Mlaga, in these services local Francoist sympathizers gave voice to grief and provided comfort to the bereaved by speaking of death as a redemptive sacrifice. In this vein, bereaved relatives in Alcaracejos were told in a funeral service that the pain of loss could be borne because the martyrs had offered their lives to rebuild the fatherland.72 Another way of providing comfort was to construct the sacrifice of their loved ones as a gift to both the nation and the bereaved relatives themselves. Indeed, those who had died were commonly said to have been the best in Spain and those who shared their bloodline stood illuminated by their glory. This is why the children of the dead were often cited as symbolizing the pride of the race and the saving of Spain for Christianity and civilization.73 The most important meaning given to the deaths of Francoists was that their sacrifice had helped eliminate Republican barbarians. For instance, an anonymous rightist from Pozoblanco, writing in the local Falangist newspaper, informed the relatives of the hundreds of people executed after trial in Valencia in December 1936 that these deaths contributed to saving Spain from barbarity.74 Further chiming with

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national forms of mourning, calls for retribution were raised at services in Pozoblanco marking the interment of the local Francoist dead. An example comes in a funeral oration by a priest from Villanueva de Crdoba. The service marked the reburial of people from the town who had been executed after trial in Republican-held Jan during the war. The priest declared to the assembled bereaved relatives that their dead demand justice against those who destroyed justice.75 There is also much evidence that understanding death as a redemptive sacrifice met the emotional needs of Francoist sectors of society in Pozoblanco. For instance, some proto-Francoists about to be executed in the Civil War took comfort from their belief that they were dying a martyrs death to regenerate Spain. One rightist condemned to death for supporting the rebellion in Villanueva de Crdoba wrote from his prison cell that he was journeying to God as one of the martyrs who had offered his life for the salvation of Spain.76 The bereaved also gained a sense of equanimity from Francoist ceremonies that linked their losses to retribution against Republicans. Newspaper reports from the period show that Francoist funeral services were very well attended and became highly emotional occasions in which families of the dead openly expressed their great sense of loss.77 Francoists in Pozoblanco supported the building of memorials in their own villages which expressed their understanding of the war and its purpose. This can be seen in the erection of crosses to the fallen to commemorate the Francoist dead. These monuments first emerged during the Civil War in parts of Spain occupied by Francoist forces. A decree of November 1938 stipulated that a list of the names of the local Francoist dead be placed below a cross fixed on the wall of a church. All of these crosses and lists of names linked national redemption with local sacrifice. Placing the name of the executed Falange leader Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera at the head of the roll of honour offered one means to do this.78 Although established by decree, the crosses proved a popular way for people to express their loss and retained great meaning for the bereaved from Francoist sectors of society. Indeed, we know that the Civil Governor of Mlaga province insisted that subscriptions to pay for crosses could only be carried out on an exclusively voluntary basis.79 We also know that in the village of Pedroche, near Pozoblanco, relatives of the Francoist dead paid for the cross to the fallen.80 Bereaved relatives in the post-war period also constructed their own private memorials. In the town of Marbella in Mlaga province, for instance, one man petitioned the authorities to be allowed to place a cross to those killed in a vile manner by the Marxist hordes.81 Similarly, in Pedroche, near Pozoblanco, a widow who lost her husband and three sons in the violence of the summer of 1936 constructed a monument in memory of her dead husband that shows how she understood his death within the broader terms of Francoist memory of the war. The monument stood on the corner of the house where she lived in the central square in Pedroche. The inscription on the memorial plaque read that her husband had been killed by the enemies of God. The widow later made a number of denunciations to military tribunals conducting repression in the area and furnished testimony in a number of other cases.82 Further evidence of the way bereaved families understood their losses in terms of sacrifices to purge Spain of its enemies is supplied in the inheritance claims made by

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Francoists in Pozoblanco after the Civil War. In these inheritance claims, relatives appear to have been free to describe the manner in which their loved ones had died. For instance, in their inheritance depositions some people chose to refrain from making excoriating comments about people associated with the defence of the Republic, perhaps because they did not share the desire to keep alive such bitter acrimony.83 Many other grassroots Francoists, however, chose to explain the cause of their bereavement as barbarous Marxism or death itself as a form of sacrifice for God and for Spain. Another war widow from Pedroche, who also supplied the military tribunals with denunciations and testimony, blamed criminal Marxism for the deaths of her husband and three sons.84 Indeed, 80 of the 153 inheritance claims made in relation to those who died in the summer of 1936 for the judicial district of Pozoblanco drew on language that reflected an acceptance of terminology redolent of Francoist collective memory and its demand for punishment.85 Such examples offer us an insight into the mix of feelings, meanings, beliefs and material rewards that helped drive popular participation in the Francoist repression. This included the confiscation of property and its reallocation to the Francoist support base. Many at the grassroots became active in this process and not simply because they pursued material reward. They also did so because they understood their experience of suffering during the war as part of an ideological conflict cast as a contest between good and evil which granted them the right to seize their enemies property. We can see this process at work when, on occupying an area, the Francoist authorities went on to confiscate the property of known supporters of the Popular Front or people who had fled their homes. Officials then stored this property in warehouses along with goods which had been recovered from the collectivization programme that occurred during the Civil War in Republican territory. Once this was done, regime supporters could put in requests for such property. Many of these requests reveal both a shared understanding with the regime of the Godless enemy and a clear desire to profit from the largesse of the Francoist state. A case in point comes from the city of Mlaga, where members of the Church played a prominent role both in reclaiming their own property and in staking a claim to other property now resting in the hands of the state. The Provincial Archive in Mlaga preserves 214 such requests. Many of the Church officials who wrote these deployed neutral language, but some did not hesitate to stake a claim to the confiscated property of their political enemies. A high-ranking official in Mlaga Cathedral, for instance, declaimed that both the city and the cathedral had fallen victim of the horrors of barbaric Marxism and asked to be granted the right to extract an array of furniture from a warehouse to compensate for what had been lost.86 In another case, a nun from Mlaga described how those from her convent had been thrown into the street and left in misery until our martyred city was rescued from the red outlaws by the glorious national army. She then went on to plead that she needed furniture for her convent and requested the right to take what she needed from the stocks held by the authorities.87 The authorities granted all such requests. Similarly, when framing their denunciations to the summary military tribunals and driving the repression forward, local Francoists drew on the ideologically charged

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language of hatred that characterized the regimes discourse, while also targeting their own personal and political enemies for elimination. Thus a group of citizens from the village of Dos Torres, near Pozoblanco, prefaced their denunciation of one of their neighbours by claiming that they had been persecuted by the red hordes.88 In another case from Villanueva de Crdoba a man from the town denounced a neighbour for killing his brother, whom he described as a martyr for God and Spain.89 In a further case from the same town another man denounced a rural labourer for demonstrating his criminal red instincts by setting fire to the denouncers house.90 In practice, however, for some Francoists all reds could be driven by criminal instincts. As one Francoist from Torrecampo told a judicial inquiry, he suspected all the groups in the Marxist Popular Front and all those affiliated to left-wing parties in the village of being capable of having killed his father.91

CONCLUSION
Some historians have argued that Francoism was imposed upon Spanish society, while many studies of Francoist memory and culture have taken a top-down approach that pays less attention to the issue of reception. However, if we focus on the Francoist memory of the martyrs and heroes alongside its accompanying demand for retribution, we can gain a new perspective on the making of early Francoism. According to the regimes discourse, death came as a form of sacrifice to redeem the nation, and this offered such solace to many grassroots Francoists that they adopted it when constructing their own monuments. The evidence further suggests that they found real comfort for their own terrible losses in the belief that retribution would honour their fallen. Moreover, the popular demand for retribution seems to be mirrored by significant participation in the repression through denunciation. Thus while political activists currently seek the removal of Francoist monuments, we can see how the regimes commemoration of the dead helped win the active backing of the regimes grassroots supporters. Importantly, this helps us to understand more about the Francoist repression that contemporary activists hope to highlight. This approach also allows us to draw some broad comparisons with other European cases. Thus while in Mussolinis Italy the regimes ideas about the value of the fallen exercised little popular appeal, in Spain it appears that the widespread losses caused by the Civil War brought a much broader acceptance of these ideas and greater support for the regime.92 Moreover, while important studies of Soviet social history have moved ideology from centre stage, they have also shown that, by taking up the regimes ideology, ordinary citizens could both satisfy their material interests and find real meaning for their lives.93 The evidence here suggests that by deploying such perspectives in the Spanish case we further advance the social history of the Spanish Civil War and gain a richer picture than that offered by turning to theories of consumerism alone. Indeed, by conducting more research into the ways in which Francoist ideology came to enjoy a depth of meaning in the lives of the regimes ordinary supporters, it seems likely we will be able to understand more about the making of the dictatorship as a political, social and cultural system.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy funded the research for this article.

NOTES
1. Serrano Suer cited in Hilari Raguer, La plvora y el incienso. La Iglesia y la Guerra Civil espaola (19361939) (Barcelona, 2001), p. 175. For the priest see Bernab Copado, Contribucin de sangre (Mlaga, 1941), pp. 26870. 2. An overview in Santos Juli (ed.), Vctimas de la guerra civil (Madrid, 1999); Julin Casanova, Una dictadura de cuarenta aos, in Julin Casanova, Francisco Espinosa, Conxita Mir and Francisco Moreno Gmez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir. La violencia en la dictadura de Franco (Barcelona, 2002), pp. 350. 3. Boletn Oficial del Estado (BOE), 27 December 2007. 4. An example of the Popular Party position in El Pas, 8 October 2007. 5. See, for example, El Pas, 21 September 2006. 6. A good early example in El Pas, 19 October 2003. 7. Historian Paul Preston argues monuments should be understood, not removed. El Pas, 2 August 2006. 8. On right-wing attitudes towards martyrdom see Mary Vincent, The Martyrs and the Saints: Masculinity and the Construction of the Francoist Crusade, History Workshop Journal, 47 (1999), pp. 6898. On the cathartic relationship between notions of sacrifice and redemption in Francoist religious processions see Michael Richards, Presenting Arms to the Blessed Sacrament: Civil War and Semana Santa in the City of Mlaga, 19361939, in Chris Ealham and Michael Richards (eds), The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 19361939 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 196222. 9. A good discussion of official Francoist memory sites may be found in Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (Oxford, 2002), pp. 7188. A good examination of the state narration of triumph is provided by Michael Richards, From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War, History and Memory, 14 (2002), pp. 979. On the dominance of Francoist memory see Alberto Reig Tapia, Memoria de la Guerra Civil. Los mitos de la tribu (Madrid, 1999). On Francoism as imposed see Daniel Sanz, La implantacin del franquismo en Alicante. El papel del Gobierno Civil (19391946) (Alicante, 2001), p. 204; Manuel Sabn, Prisin y muerte en la Espaa de postguerra (Madrid, 1996), p. 236; Manuel Ortiz, Violencia poltica en la II Repblica y el primer franquismo (Madrid, 1996), pp. 40912. On the importance of reception in memory studies see Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method, American Historical Review, 102 (1997), pp. 1386403. 10. Francisco J. Romero Salvad, Spain and the First World War: The Structural Crisis of the Liberal Monarchy, European History Quarterly, 25 (1995), p. 540. 11. Benjamin Martin, The Agony of Modernization: Labour and Industrialisation in Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 21450. 12. Juan Diaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas, Crdoba (antecedentes para una reforma agraria) (Madrid, 1984), pp. 265363; Martin, The Agony, pp. 21130. 13. Frances Lannon, The Socio-political Role of the Spanish Church A Case Study, Journal of Contemporary History, 14 (1979), p. 194; Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain 18751975 (Oxford, 1987), p. 16, pp. 945.

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14. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Fascism from Above: The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain 19231930 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 31899; Shlomo Ben-Ami, The Origins of the Second Republic in Spain (Oxford, 1978), pp. 1441. 15. Alejandro Quiroga, Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 192330 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 57, 601. 16. Julio Gil Pecharromn, Conservadores subversivos. La derecha autoritaria Alfonsina (19131936) (Madrid, 1994), pp.1014, 175. 17. Paul Preston, Alfonsist Monarchists and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War, Journal of Contemporary History, 7 (1972), p. 111; Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (London, 2006), pp. 8991. 18. On the Carlists see Martin Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 19311939 (Cambridge, 1975), particularly p. 18; Jordi Canal, Republicanos y carlistas contra el estado. Violencia poltica en la Espaa finisecular, Ayer, 13 (1994), p. 77 19. Vincent, The Martyrs and the Saints, pp. 767. 20. Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialisation of Youth in Fascist Italy, 19221943 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), p. 27. 21. Mussolini cited in Alan Kramer, Dynamics of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), p. 300. 22. Emilio Gentile, Fascism as a Political Religion, Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (1990), pp. 2423. 23. The classic discussion of this topic can be found in George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1990). 24. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp. 2334. 25. Ismael Saz, Mussolini contra La Repblica. Hostilidad, conspiraciones, intervencin (19311936) (Valencia, 1986); Pecharromn, Conservadores subversivos, p. 102. 26. Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London, 1994), p. 257. 27. Stanley Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford, CA, 1967), pp. 31137; Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005), pp. 213. 28. Enrique Moradiellos, El reidero de Europa. Las dimensiones internacionales de la guerra civil espaola (Barcelona, 2001), pp. 8890. 29. Nicholas Coni, Medicine and the Spanish Civil War, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95 (2002), p. 147. 30. On the figures see Casanova, Una dictadura de cuarenta aos, p. 8. 31. Michael Alpert, El ejrcito republicano en la guerra civil (Barcelona, 1977), pp. 2731. 32. Javier Cervera, Madrid en guerra. La ciudad clandestina, 19361939 (Madrid, 1998), pp. 5456; Julin Casanova, Anarquismo y revolucin en la sociedad rural aragonesa, 19361938 (Madrid, 1985), p. 165. 33. Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, p. 201. 34. Joan Villaroya i Font, La vergenza de la Repblica, La aventura de la historia, 1 (1999), p. 32. 35. Carmen Gonzlez Martnez, Guerra Civil en Murcia. Un anlisis sobre el poder y los comportamientos colectivos (Murcia, 1999), p. 158; Antonio Nadal, Guerra civil en Mlaga (Mlaga, 1985), pp. 1745; Glicerio Snchez Recio, Justicia en guerra en Espaa. Los Tribunales Populares (19361939) (Alicante, 1991), p. 27; Alpert, El ejrcito, p. 80. 36. Archivo Histrico Nacional Madrid (AHN-M), Causa General (CG), 1044, 1. 37. Gabriel Garca de Consuegra et al., Represin en Pozoblanco. Guerra civil y posguerra (Crdoba, 1989), p. 191. See also the discussion of Republican trials in Glicerio Snchez Recio, Justicia en guerra.

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38. Elas de Mateo Avils, Las vctimas del Frente Popular en Mlaga. La otra memoria histrica (Mlaga, 2007), p. 38. 39. De Mateo Avils, Las vctimas, pp. 38, 60. 40. Archivo Histrico Provincial de Mlaga (AHPM), 125068 and 1232636. 41. Raguer, La plvora, pp. 834; William Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 18751998 (Washington, DC, 2000), pp. 34651. 42. Cited in Raguer, La plvora, p. 108. 43. Glicerio Snchez Recio, De las dos ciudades a la resurreccin de Espaa. Magisterio pastoral y pensamiento poltico de Enrique Pla y Deniel (Valladolid, 1994), pp. 9599, 26. 44. Isidro Gom y Toms, Por Dos y Por Espaa. Pastorales instrucciones pastorales y artculos discursos mensajes apndice, 19361939 (Barcelona, 1940), pp. 5649. 45. Gom y Toms, Por Dos, pp. 57, 5747. 46. Cited in Snchez Recio, De las dos ciudades, p. 76. 47. Gom y Toms, Por Dos, pp. 3349. 48. Cited in Snchez Recio, De las dos ciudades, p. 109. 49. For the stress on the Catholic side of Francoist commemoration see Giuliana di Febo, Ritos de guerra y de victoria en la Espaa franquista (Bilbao, 2002), especially pp. 27101. For a more critical perspective on the link between the Church and political religion, see Zira Box, La tesis de la religin poltica y sus crticos: aproximacin a un debate actual, Ayer, 62 (2006), pp. 195230. 50. An example in Antonio Aracil, Dolor y triunfo. Hroes y mrtires en pueblos de Andaluca durante el Movimiento Nacional (Barcelona, 1944), p. 391. On shared understandings between the CEDA and the Falange and on martyrs purifying Spain see Mary Vincent, Spain, in Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway (eds), Political Catholicism in Europe, 19181965 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 97128, 11213, 119. On the way Italian fascism attempted to remove the distinction between the religious and political spheres, see Emilio Gentile, Fascism as a Political Religion, Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1990), pp. 22951. 51. On the need to give meaning to death in war by forging something positive from it, see Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: Les Anciens Combattants and French Society 19141939 (Oxford, 1992), p. 23. See also Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp. 67. An overview of Francoist atrocity literature can be found in Hugo Garca, Relatos para una guerra. Terror, testimonio y literatura en la Espaa nacional, Ayer, 76 (2009), pp. 14376. 52. Aracil, Dolor y triunfo, pp. 56. 53. Aracil, Dolor y triunfo, p. 270. On the role of atrocity stories dehumanizing the enemy see Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp. 1724. 54. Aracil, Dolor y triunfo, pp. 6, 3023. 55. Antonio Prez de Olaguer, El terror rojo en Catalua (Burgos, 1937), pp. 24, 1011, 14. 56. Antonio Prez de Olaguer, El terror rojo en Andaluca (Burgos, 1938), p. 83. 57. Azul, 3 January 1940. 58. Franco cited in Azul, 28 March 1939. 59. Michael Seidman, Frentes en calma de la Guerra Civil, Historia Social, 27 (1997), pp. 3759, p. 39. 60. Michael Seidman, Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, WI, 2002), p. 216. 61. Seidman, Frentes, p. 59. 62. BOE, 27 August 1939. 63. Antonio Ruiz Vilaplana, Burgos Justice: A Years Experience of Nationalist Spain (London, 1938), pp. 1412.

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64. Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble (London, 1941), p. 77. 65. AHN-M, CG, 1044, 2, folios 7649, 837 7649, 839. See also Archivo Tribunal Militar Segundo Sevilla (ATMSS), 198, 3456. 66. Archivo Municipal de Torrecampo, Caja Secretario Falange, letter dated 11 May 1940. 67. For example, ATMSS, 699, 20571; Archivo Histrico Provincial de Crdoba (AHPC), Ley de Responsibilidades Polticas (LRP), 6, 358 1943; AHPC, LRP, 10, 44 1942. 68. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 694. 69. El Sur, 4 December 1942. 70. Copado, Contribucin de sangre, p. 269. 71. An example in ABC Madrid, 30 July 1939. 72. Azul, 5 September 1939. 73. Azul, 20 April 1939; Copado, Contribucin de sangre, p. 269. 74. Azul, 19 August 1939. 75. Copado, Contribucin de sangre, pp. 26870. 76. Copado, Contribucin de sangre, p. 175. 77. An example in Azul, 20 May 1939. 78. Julin Casanova, La iglesia de Franco (Madrid, 2001), p. 298. 79. Archivo Municipal de Marbella (AMMB) 105, letter 14 May 1938. 80. Interview with AMG, Pedroche, 2 July 2004. 81. AMMB 106, letter 25 August 1938. 82. Examples in ATMSS 641, 20429; ATMSS 590, 19384; ATMSS 316, 12806. 83. For example, AHPC, Seccin Judicial (SJ), Audiencia Provincial de Crdoba (APC), Civil, 1941, 232 and AHPC, SJ, APC, Civil, 1941, 232. 84. General examples in AHPC, SJ, APC, Civil, 1939, 227 and AHPC, SJ, APC, Civil, 1940, 229. The widow in AHPC, SJ, APC, Civil, 1940, 229 and 1941, 232. 85. AHPC, SJ, APC, Civil, 19391945. 86. AHPM, 12344, 181. 87. AHPM, 12344, letter of B.S.F. Similar examples in AHPM, 12344, 20 May 1937 and 12344, 19 August 1937. 88. ATMSS, 268/10979. 89. ATMSS, 4806, 20731. 90. ATMSS, 519, 17942. 91. AHN-M, CG, 1044, 1, Torrecampo Declaraciones. 92. Koon, Believe, Obey, p. xx. 93. For example Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1995), pp. 2234.
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