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Paul Preston, The Spanish holocaust:inquisition and extermination intwentieth-century Spain (London:Harper Collins, 2012)

HELEN GRAHAM, JO LABANYI, JORGE MARCO,PAUL PRESTON and MICHAEL RICHARDS

IntroductionPaul Preston is perhaps the best-known contemporary historian in Spain, and iswidely read both in universities and by the general public in the Spanish andEnglish speaking worlds. He is particularly well known for his biographies ofFrancisco Franco (London: Fontana, 1995) and Juan Carlos (London: HarperCollins, 2004). Prestons interpretations of some of the key events in the recenthistory of Spain have become paradigmatic. In 2007, Preston was made CaballeroGran Cruz de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica, Spains highest civilian honour. Inthis review forum, four leading historians of modern Spain discuss the impact ofhis latest book, The Spanish holocaust, and more generally the impact thatgenocide studies has had on Spain. Preston replies to the reviews at the end ofthe forum.

JO LABANYIFrom great causes to bare life

Paul Prestons eagerly awaited account of extra-judicial killings relating to theSpanish civil war (previously published in Spanish translation in 2011) is anuncomfortable book to read. This is partly because of the harrowing nature ofthe events recounted, and partly because the accumulation of detail over its 528pages makes it impossible to adhere to any clear-cut view one might have had

Journal of Genocide Research, 2014Vol. 16, No. 1, 139168, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2014.878120

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

of any of the political groups involved, since one constantly encounters events thatcomplicate the pictureoccasionally for the better but mostly for the worse. Thisis history writing at its complex best. One thing does, however, emerge with ter-rifying clarity: that the military rebels, and their supporters, who in July 1936 tookup arms to overthrow the Second Spanish Republic did so to implement a plan ofextermination formulated in advance. The Spanish civil war has often been seen asthe last war fought in the name of great causes. No reader of this book can continueto hold that romanticized view. This is not to say that those responsible for the kill-ings did not in most cases adhere sincerely to ideologies of various colours. Whatthis book shows, however, is that what ultimately counts is what historical actorsdo. The ability of the rebels (in particular but not exclusively) to say one thing andto do something that in practice translated into the opposite emerges as a frighten-ing constant. In this sense, the book is an illuminating exploration of the duplicityof political rhetoric. It is also a study of the importance of rhetoric, showing howinflammatory language led people to commit atrocities that they regarded asentirely justified.

Of course Preston is himself engaging in rhetoric by titling his book TheSpanish holocaust, as he is well aware (p. xi). He is not the first to compare theFrancoist repression with the Nazi extermination of the Jews. The book accompa-nying Montse Armengou and Ricard Beliss 2003 documentary for Catalan tele-vision, Les fosses del silenci (The Graves of Silence), on the mass graves from theFrancoist repression, was subtitled Hay un Holocausto espanol? (Is there aSpanish holocaust?); the title of the English version of their documentary, TheSpanish holocaust, answered their own question in the affirmative.1 TheSpanish philosopher Reyes Mates Benjaminian reflections on the Holocausthave made the same comparison.2 While the tendency in memory studies toanalyse any traumatic event through the template of the Holocaust runs the riskof homogenizing atrocities whose contexts may have been very different, thereare strategic reasons for its use in the case of Spain. The primary reason hasbeen to combat the Franco regimes whitewashing of its rule of terror, stillbelieved by many in Spain today as necessary to save Spain from commun-isma line swallowed by the Western powers who in the Cold War embracedFranco as an ally. Preston states categorically that the civil war that resultedfrom the initial failure of the military rebellion against the Republic wasunnecessary (p. xx).

Second, use of the term holocaust forces readers to set the Francoist repressionin the context of the contemporaneous Nazi extermination project. Prestons statedaim is not to equate the extra-judicial killings in Spain with those in the Nazi deathcamps, but to invite comparative study (pp. xixii). Ample evidence is given ofapproval of Nazi policies by the rebel leaders, and of their close relations withNazi Germany, going well beyond Nazi military aidto the extent that, duringWorld War Two, the Franco dictatorship supplied the German army with bloodtransfusions taken forcibly from undernourished Republican prisoners (p. 515).

Third, the comparison with the Holocaust reminds readers that if Holocaustremembrance is today, more than ever, seen as an ethical imperative, there is

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no case for the claimfrequently heard in Spainthat what happened in thecountry seventy or eighty years ago is best forgotten. It is striking that there ismore awareness, both in Spain and elsewhere, of the extra-judicial killingsunder the military in Argentina and Chilewhere the documented figures are8,960 and 2,279 respectivelythan there is of the estimated 150,000 victims ofthe Francoist terror.

A fourth reason, not mentioned by Preston, why use of the term holocaust isstrategic in the Spanish context is that the terms application to the Francoist terrorlabels it a crime against humanity. According to the Rome Statute of the Inter-national Criminal Court, crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations,which means that, in theory, perpetrators still alive today can be prosecuted. Itwas the assumption that crimes against humanity have no statute of limitationsthat led Supreme Court Judge Baltasar Garzon, in September 2008, to initiate alegal investigation into the crimes of Francoisman attempt that provoked mul-tiple legal proceedings against him, resulting in his being banned from legal prac-tice in Spain. Although he was cleared in the case accusing him of prevarication inopening an investigation into the crimes of Francoism, the Spanish Supreme Courtdecreed that, under the 1977 Amnesty Law passed during the transition to democ-racy, such crimes cannot be investigated.

It is not clear whether Preston intends the comparison with the Holocaust toinclude the approximately 50,000 extra-judicial killings in the Republican zone.The term inquisition in his subtitle Inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain can be applied only to the rebels, enthusiastically supported inword and deed by the Church, with the exception of Basque nationalist clergyand the occasional priest who took seriously the Christian virtue of charity, asPreston demonstrates. In effect, Prestons narrative does not make much of theimplications of the term inquisition, apart from mentioning that Francos 1939end-of-year speech claimed that Spains late fifteenth-century Catholic monarchs,who founded the Inquisition to extirpate residual Jewish practices among Jewishconverts to Christianity as well as expelling from Spain those Jews who refused toconvert, had paved the way for Nazi antisemitic legislation (p. 471); and that thepro-Franco eugenicist Antonio Vallejo Nagera, notoriously obsessed with cleans-ing the race of the red gene, also took the Inquisition as his model (pp. 514515).By contrast, the term extermination forms the backbone of his book.

The term holocaust might be seen as extending to those killings in the Repub-lican zone that resulted from anarchist demands for purification through vio-lence, uncomfortably echoing the rebels sacrificial rhetoric (a topic I will comeback to). Some readers will not like Prestons negative view of the anarchists,blamed for glorifying violence. Indeed, Preston corroborates accusations madeat the time of substantial right-wing infiltration of anarchist groups. In practice,however, Preston demonstrates (without explicitly making the argument) thatonly the Francoist repression can strictly be labelled a crime against humanity,given that the term is legally limited to crimes implemented or condoned by gov-ernment policy (in this case, the rebels wartime government and the ensuingFranco dictatorship). Although the anarchists did enter the Republican

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government in November 1936, and although Preston documents calls for exter-mination on the part of some communists (notably La Pasionaria on p. 265), hedetails the many attempts made by the Republican authorities to curb the violencein the rear-guard, noting the physical bravery that this sometimes entailed. He alsoshows how Republicans who saved the lives of right-wingers and of members ofthe clergy and religious orders were routinely shot by the rebels on taking Repub-lican territory, regardless.

Preston makes no statements about the desirability or feasibility of prosecutingthose perpetrators who are still alive. But in effect he mounts an indictment of allthose responsible, on both sides, for violence against civilians, through his relent-less assemblage of atrocities. As the 120 pages of notes (in small print and doublecolumns) make clear, this mass of information has primarily been culled from themany existing local histories of the Francoist repression undertaken in the lastthree decades, to which Preston acknowledges his debt (p. 529). The specificityof local detail is crucial to his narrative, which, while roughly respecting chronol-ogy, moves geographically round the peninsula. For his exhaustive account of rep-risals in the Republican zone, he has had to rely substantially on period sources,given that, to date, historians have tended to acknowledge these only to moveswiftly to the investigation of Francoist atrocities. A major merit of Prestonsbook is that it does not duck the task of chronicling Republican atrocities,which take up the whole of Part 3 and half of Parts 4 and 5 (out of a total offour parts devoted to the wartime period). Part 1 examines the rights concerteddestabilization of the Republic from the moment of its institution in 1931. Part6 examines the postwar Francoist terror.

Recent historiography has tended to reject the earlier tendency to take theRepublic and civil war togethera tendency initiated by right-wing historianseager to demonstrate that the Republic (and not the July 1936 military uprising)caused the civil war. By contrast, recent historians have tended to group thecivil war and the dictatorship together, in order to argue that the dictatorshipwas the continuation of the war by other meansa point made by Preston inthis book (p. 471). Prestons book covers the Republic, the war and the postwarperiod, in order to show the continuum between all three periodsnot in thesense that the Republic caused the war but, on the contrary, to demonstrate thatthe rights refusal to abide by Republican legislation fuelled the hatreds thatwould translate into mass killing after the military coup. Preston insists oncalling the nationalists (the technical name of the alliance of monarchists, Carlistsand fascists who supported the military uprising) the rebels, to make the pointthat they were the instigators of the violence. As he states, [i]t is difficult tosee how the violence in the Republican zone could have happened without themilitary coup (p. xiii).

Prestons Part 1, devoted to the pre-war period, is what clinches the case hemounts against the Spanish right. His extensive research into landowners gratu-itous violence against rural workers who attempted to enforce the Republicslabour legislation, and documentation of the illegal removal of Republicanmayors under conservative government from 1933 to 1935, shows that all that

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was needed to turn this recourse to illegality into full-scale war was for the mili-tary to step in. Indeed, he shows how the term civil war was extensively used bythe right before the war began. Part 1 also demonstrates the major role played byofficers from the Army of Africa, brutalized by a vicious colonial war in SpanishMorocco, in disseminating a racist rhetoric that equated the working classes athome with the rebellious Moroccan tribes they regarded and treated as savages.Also conclusively demonstrated in Part 1 is the prevalence of antisemitic rhetoricamong the Spanish right, with fascinating research into the circulation (and, mostimportantly, imitation) in Spain of international antisemitic propaganda, from Theprotocols of the Elders of Zion to the Geneva-based Bulletin de lEntente Interna-tionale contre la Troisie`me Internationale, read by Franco and the 1936 coupsdirector, General Mola. These twin forms of racism often combined in claimsthat communism was a joint Jewish and Muslim plot to destroy Christian civiliza-tion. Any Spaniard who still believes that Spain does not have a history of racismshould read Part 1 of this book. Masonry was, of course, lumped together withthese betes noires; Prestons extensive citation of right-wing Spanish textsdenouncing the Jewish-communist-Muslim-masonic threat to the Western worldmakes one want to know more about what masonry actually meant to thosewho practised it in 1930s Spain.

Preston states (p. xi) that the main reason for his books title is the antisemiticrhetoric of the 1936 coups leaders and supporters. Having said this at the start, hisbook does not make further mention of the Holocaustexcept to document theapproximately 10,000 Republican exiles that the Franco dictatorship knowinglyallowed to be deported to Nazi extermination camps (pp. 515516). His narrativestrings together events and statements that speak for themselves in demonstratinga systematic plan of extermination on the part of the right, without need for expli-cit comment. (One might, however, question the occasional attribution of killingsto the worst instincts [p. 221] or bloodlust [pp. 313, 447] of those responsible.)In Part 1, brilliant use is made of the flash-forward to show how those individualswho, before the war, protested at landowners violations of Republican legislationwould, on the arrival of rebel troops (narrated in later parts of the book), be theprime targets of extermination, clinching the argument that the military rebellionwas conceived as the propertied classes revenge on those who had challengedtheir power before the war started.

Conversely, Preston details the specific circumstances of Republican atrocitiesto show how they were in many cases responses to immediately preceding rebelair raids, or to stories of rebel massacres in recently conquered territory broughtby refugees fleeing the violence and indeed broadcast on the radio by the rebelsthemselves as a warning to Republican urban strongholds of the fate thatawaited them (p. 281). If inflammatory rhetoric led to violent action (on bothsides), so violent action (on the nationalist side only) functioned as a messageto the enemy. Chapter 10, titled A terrified city responds, is devoted to the mas-sacre at Paracuellos in November 1936 of between 2,200 and 2,500 prisonersevacuated from Madrids jails: the one atrocity where the Republican auth-oritiesMadrids Junta de Defensa, put in charge when the Republican cabinet

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left for Valencia on 6 Novemberhad at least partial complicity in ordering theevacuations, and a source of longstanding controversy because of the involvementof Santiago Carrillo, the future leader of Spains clandestine Communist Party.Preston sets this atrocity in the context of intensified rebel air raids on Madrid,and the fact that by 6 November the advancing rebel army was just twohundred yards from the Carcel Modelo, which housed 2,000 army officers whohad refused allegiance to the Republic (p. 344). He takes seriously the threat toRepublican Madrid of the fifth column, giving examples of Falangist infiltrators,but does not minimize the horror of the mass executions that ensued. While unableto verify exactly who ordered the killings at Paracuellos, he establishes that Car-rillo was one of those involved at the highest level, with a measure of anarchist andSoviet connivance. Preston exonerates the Republican authorities from the murderof Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) leader Andreu Nin, attributedsquarely to the Soviet Narodny Komissariat Vnutzrennick Del (NKVD) onaccount of Nins former association with Trotsky.

Prestons account does not change the overall estimates for the killings on bothsides: to the wartime figures of 150,000 in the rebel zone and 50,000 in the Repub-lican zone, he adds that of 20,000 Republicans executed after the wars end (p. xi).The 3D column charts in the Appendix, comparing violence in both zones in arange of provinces, vividly illustrate the disproportion between the killings inboth zones, interestingly showing that in Catalonia Republican killings signifi-cantly outnumbered those by the rebels. What this book contributes to existingscholarship, in addition to its detailed investigation of killings in the Republicanzone, is its conclusive demonstration of the systematic, gratuitous brutality ofthe Francoist reprisals, authorized and indeed encouraged at the highest levels.Preston assembles a chilling number of statements by rebel leaders and their sup-porters showing that they did not see the working classes as human. He notes howlandowners mounted police, which volunteered to assist the repression in therural south, pursued workers as if on a hunting party (p. 165). If the rebelsrewarded the Moroccan mercenaries who fought for them, in an army organizedon colonial lines, with licence to rape, mutilate and pillage in order to sowterror in the enemy, this shows that they did not regard their Moroccan troopsas human either. And if, as Preston notes (p. xix), the Republics respect forwomen meant that few rapes were committed in the Republican zone, by contrastin the nationalist zone Republican women were systematically gang-raped for theywere seen as subhuman. The cases cited of Republican women being locked, oneor two at a time, in a room with twenty or fifty Moors (pp. 333334) testify hor-ribly to the animalization of both parties.

One is mindful here of Giorgio Agambens analysis of the Nazi exterminationcamps as the reduction of those considered enemies of the state to the status ofbare life: the condition of those who can be killed but cannot be sacrificed, forthey have no value.3 Agamben criticizes as irresponsible historiographical blind-ness the desire to give the extermination of the Jews a sacrificial dimensionthrough use of the term Holocaust, since they were exterminated exactly asHitler had announced, as lice, which is to say, as bare life (p. 114). Preston

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amply demonstrates the use of religious rhetoric by the rebels, who divided theirenemies into those beyond redemption, who must be exterminated, and thosewho could be redeemedmeaning subjected to torture, rape, imprisonment orslave labour. According to the logic of this religious rhetoric, the sacrifice wasthat of the perpetrators, willing to risk death in their crusade. Although manyanarchists also, paradoxically, used religious rhetoric in their exaltation of vio-lence to purify society, the targets of their violence were precisely those whohad too much value and thus could and should be sacrificed.

Given Agambens point, perhaps genocide is a better word than holocaust todesignate the crime against humanity that was the Francoist campaign of extermi-nation waged against the Republics supporters. In his book The meaning of gen-ocide, which tries to establish characteristics common to various twentieth-century cases of genocide (from Ottoman Armenia to Rwanda), Mark Leveneidentifies one final, clinching criterion: the perpetrators belief (illusory but sin-cerely held) that they were the victims, threatened by forces of evil bent ontheir extermination.4 This is an exact definition of the mindset that emergesfrom Prestons painstaking (and painful) account of Francoist atrocities and ofthe twisted rhetoric that legitimated them. Thus, the military rebels accused thedemocratically elected Republic of rebellion, and persistently blamed its suppor-ters for atrocities they themselves had committed (standard practice, incidentally,in nationalist film propaganda), to the extent of mutilating Republican corpses sothey could be photographed as victims of the Red terror (p. 333).5

Prestons epilogue runs through the cases of several nationalists who after thewar distanced themselves from the regime or in later life were tormented by guilt,in some cases committing suicide or going mad. What we are supposed to make ofthis is not clear. What interests me is the final example, which returns to the Condede Alba de Yeltes, Gonzalo de Aguilera, whose boast of having shot six of hislabourers on the outbreak of war to teach the others a lesson opened Prestonsfirst chapter. Preston ends his epilogue by recounting how Gonzalo, in 1964,having suffered for some time from persecution mania, shot his two sons andtried to shoot his wife, and was detained in a psychiatric hospital (pp. 526528). This is presented as a case of a perpetrator mentally unhinged by hiscrimes. In fact, the persecution mania exemplified by this anecdote could beseen as a perfect example, taken to the extreme, of the mindset of perpetratorsof genocide as identified by Levene.

MICHAEL RICHARDSCivil war, mass murder and the nation-state in Spain

The Spanish holocaust sets the violence of Spains war in a broad social, politicaland international context while sacrificing none of the complexity of events. Neverbefore, indeed, have the political dynamics and decision-making processes behindthe resort to terror and brutality in the era of the civil war been charted in suchdetail, across the entire geography of the country and in both Republican andrebel zones. The level of expertise in the political and social history and the

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ease of mastery of the vast range of sources deployed are hugely impressive. PaulPrestons harrowing and often moving account draws together the themes ofseveral of his previous works: these include studies devoted to the political polar-ization and fragmentation of the Second Republic, to the political dynamics of thecivil war, and to General Franco, the figure who more than any other individualepitomized the nature of the conflict and its violence.6 The current book is abrand new synthesis, however, which develops the crucial differences betweenthe violence of both zones in greater detail and depth than has previously beenpossible. So sustained and firm is the authors grip on the essential chronologicalstructure, the socio-political context and the comparative framework of zones andregions that it is tempting to view criticisms of the Spanish edition (whichappeared before the English version) as grounded largely in politicalpositioning related to the ongoing controversy in Spain over historicalmemory and to Prestons use of the word holocaust in the title of his book(of which more below).7

The book is in six largely chronologically ordered parts which examine broadthemes in turn. First, the origins of violence in the social war during the pre-waryears of the Republic (193136) are outlined and the ways in which this unde-clared war produced a violent discourse on the part of various right-wing the-orists of extermination and revolutionary rhetoric from the left wing of thesocialist movement. The exterminationist discourse, though it arose primarilyfrom elements of the Catholic Church and the colonial army, was not out ofstep with rightist political parties, including the Confederacion Espanola de Dere-chas Autonomas (CEDA), the mass Catholic party of the right, which, alongsidethe avowedly fascist Falange, was drawn prominently towards theories and prac-tices espoused by Mussolini and Hitler. The radicalizing effects on the left of thisfascist threat are clear; Preston is not slow to criticize the political ineptness of asection of the left for posing as revolutionaries without seeing the necessity ofaccommodating itself with the pragmatic and moderate majority of socialist andRepublican leaders. Fascism notwithstanding, Catholicism and the Churchwould provide legitimation of the war, allowing the attempted military coup inJuly 1936 to evolve rapidly into a Holy War rather than a military rebellion(enabling resistance to the rebels to be constructed by the insurgents as the trueillegal rebellion). The military rebels would proceed to purge Spain as thoughthey were engaged in a war of colonial conquest and the extermination of a pro-blematic population.

Part 2 reconstructs in great detail the nightmarish torrent of violence thataccompanied and followed the military rebellion. The dynamic relationshipbetween state-sponsored ideology and the strategy of occupationthe practiceof military authorities on the groundand the responses of ordinary citizensforms the basis of the books central thesis: that rebel violence was essentiallyinstitutionalized and systematic, while the violent response in defence of theRepublics elected government was spontaneous and amorphous. The top-down dynamic of the rebels violence, applied equally in the region of thegreat landed estates of the south as in the Catholic heartlands of the smallholding

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rural north, was in stark contrast to the popular and responsive violence of thefirst months of the conflict in urban and rural Republican areas that was used inthe act of beating off the rebellion. Part 5 of the book takes this argumentfurther, developing the thesis that there were two distinct concepts of war inoperation.

The spontaneity of Republican violence (from below) is discussed in Part 3where it is shown to have resulted from the conditions created by the militaryrebellion: the coup not only intensified hatred for elite groups that had obstructedthe Republics reforms but also disabled the Republican states legitimated appar-atus of coercion for maintaining public order and for defending the institutionsthrough which sovereignty was exercised. The shearing off of a sizeable andpowerful portion of the states own apparatus of control (quickly aided byforeign powers in the shape of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy) encouraged con-servative civil servants, the judiciary and policemany linked by professionand class to the pre-1931 incarnation of the stateto withhold their loyalty.This undermining of the state would become an aggravating factor in the toxicityof the politics of the Republican zone during the war and the opportunistic crimi-nality that prospered during the first five months or so, operating within the fis-sures of fractured state power and exploiting the fears and phobias of abesieged society. The fact that the interests of political parties, movements, andtrade union militias quickly came to predominate over those of the stateandof the political leadershipconstituted a further element that poisoned the Repub-lics politics of war. Militants of most groups (and especially the anarchist move-ment and the orthodox communists of the Partido Comunista de Espana (PCE))gave priority to maximizing the influence and power of their own organizations.This frequently provided cover for individual advancement in the lower ranksand personal gain and did great damage to the Republic and its war effort. Vio-lence in Republican areas was therefore not only generally smaller in scale thanthe rebel purge of conquered territory, but it also ran counter to the personal senti-ments and public declarations and actions of those who were at the heart of thegovernments political leadership. The chronology here is significant: the spon-taneous violence of the inchoate and piecemeal social revolution in the Republicanzone was much greater during the first five months of the war and centralized auth-ority and public control were gradually clawed back. This reduced revolutionaryviolence, but the costs of rebuilding wartime state power in the Republican zonewere also substantial, now in terms of violence shaped in part by the governmentbeing increasingly mortgagedpolitically, economically and militarilytoStalins Soviet Union.

In Part 4 Preston shows how the tensions of total war were absorbed by thebesieged government under the enormous pressure of the military advances ofthe rebel forces (aided by Hitler and Mussolini). The pressure was intensifiedby information filtering through from refugees about the merciless nature ofrebel violence, by dependence on aid and advice from the Soviet Union andby public paranoia about the fifth column which the rebel leaders boasted byradio was operating to their great advantage in the Republican cities. It was

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from this nexus that the notorious massacre of more than 2,000 rightist militarypersonnel and others imprisoned in Republican Madrid took place at Paracuellosand Torrejon de Ardoz in November and early December 1936. Preston goes togreat lengths to assign responsibility for the murders and concludes, convincingly,that it resulted from the interaction of intention, negligence and connivance, all ofwhich were made possible by the incapacity of the government to replace dualpower (that of the state and that of the street) with solid and effective legaland penal institutions during the first four months of war without resort to thethinking and practices of the Stalinist NKVD. The leading political figures ofthe Republic were appalled by the violence.

In the light of these considerations, Part 5 elaborates upon the thesis contrastingthe two concepts of war in Spain: one that sought to defend the Republic fromthe enemy within, amidst debilitating divisions and legitimate fears of infiltra-tion, and the other based on the rebel authorities desire to prosecute a war ofannihilation. The use of political and armed power in the Republican zonerested on far more complex dynamics than Francoist propaganda claimedduring the war and for decades thereafter. Preston is critical of the anarchistswho, with notable exceptions, were guilty of making demands on the state intheir own interests while at the same time undermining its effectiveness and legiti-macy. From May 1937, the new head of the government, Juan Negrn, wouldredouble efforts begun months earlier to centralize state instruments in order todirect coercive force more effectively against the real fifth column and rebel infil-trators. This wartime strategy was shaped both by a personal ethical frameworkand the paramount aim of keeping the Republic alive rather than exhausting ener-gies attacking internal leftist rivals. Thus, he clashed with Soviet representativeswhile recognizing that they would have to be tolerated since Stalins aid wasthe regimes only lifeline.

The central thesis of The Spanish holocaust is thus that political power was con-stituted and exercised violently in specific ways in the two wartime zones. Rebelviolence emanated from a single coherent set of institutions and ideas whereasterror in the Republican zone was a consequence of spontaneous action beyondthe control of the fractured state. The coalition of fractious political parties andgroups of the Republican side only gradually and problematically movedtowards an agreed strategy of coercion and repression of enemies. In the insurgentzone violent death had to do with the construction of a new power, while in theloyalist zone it resulted from the collapse of power.8 Examination of the compet-ing organizations of power, the ideological, military, economic and politicalresources that each side drew upon, and the objectives in each camp to whichpower was directed supports this thesis.

Civil wars are struggles to define the meaning, shape and destiny of thenation (or to impose one nation upon others in a multi-nation state) and to takecontrol of state power. Inevitably, therefore, the ideologies and pathologies ofthe nation-state are central to explanation of the political and military strategiesof internal wars. Analysis of the nature of relevant agents of coercive power,wielded at several levels, is essential. Although Preston eschews theory, it is

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clear that the battle lines of the social war during the period from 1931 until theattempted coup on 1718 July 1936 were drawn around attitudes towards modern-ization and modernity. Well before the arrival of the Second Republic, politics hadbeen shaped by perceptions of national decline, the loss of empire and threats totraditions (especially, for the right, empire, idealized peasant life and Catholi-cism), andfor both left and rightthe need for regeneration. Aspirations tocreate a more effective state and develop a greater sense of national solidarityformed the immediate context for the transformative reform and moral projectattempted by liberal Republicans from April 1931, as well as for stubborn eliteopposition to reform, an opposition based on organic nationalism.

The postulates of both ways of envisioning the nation-states response to moder-nity and modern conditions of popular and ideological political mobilization wereramified in different ways during the polarized era of the Republic, the essenceof which was the arrival of mass democracy. The fundamental basis of the 1931Republican constitution was that sovereignty resided with the people (el pueblorepublicano, as the Republics president, Manuel Azana, couched it).9 At thesame time, for conservatives and fascists, democratic aspirations became entwinedwith notions of the integral or organic nation; the indivisible people in this for-mulation was based less on citizenship and the constitutional nationalism of Repub-licans than on heritage, religion and cultural inheritance and identity. The formerwould prove ultimately to be a weaker mobilizing basis than the organic and Catho-lic nationalism of the Republics opponents. The Republic failed and democratiza-tion stalled in part because of political errors but largely also because the strength ofthe state ebbed away from within, causing its social legitimacy among the workingclass also to dissipate. In the face of the sudden emergence of mass politics, the rightincreasingly harked back to the undemocratic pastto the purifying reconquestfrom Islam, expulsion and forced conversion, and the glories of the counter-refor-mation and their religious, quasi-ethnic implications.

The non-democratic tradition is important in the origins of the civil war and intracing the intentions, implementation and enforcement of the wars violence. Thestate relied on the army (especially its brutal colonialist Africanista culture) andthe integralist Church as, in turn, executive organs of bureaucratic control and asideological arbiters of power. They were, in effect, the only centralizing forceswith a political presence throughout the entirety of Spain. This reliance would cir-cumscribe state and government responses to the multiplicity of demands comingfrom fragmented civil society in the period 193136. With war, as Preston demon-strates, the military would take the lead in mass killing, with Catholic ideologicalbacking and assistance from the landed elite and zealous Falangists. Some of thelatter sought fascist transcendence through heavy involvement with eitherpurging and purifying in lieu of a fascist revolution that Franco and his elitesocial backers had no reason to permit. Support for fascism from below waslimited in Spain: conflict in the 1930s revolved around a bald choicewhether mod-ernization would be achieved by the squeezed middle classes with support fromthe masses or from societys elites. Those with the capacity to bring aboutchange would opt overwhelmingly to limit its extent by allying with entrenched

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elites. To protect the national essence the overwhelmingly traditionalist right foughtnot to neutralize elite power and to nationalize the masses but to conserve throughextreme violence the unproductive social order over which elites presided. This wasin line with the colonial armys intent on a predatory war of elimination. Many Falan-gists were landowners, anyway, as were many army officers: thus, fascism in Spainwas itself largely conservative, although elites were supplemented by many small-holding peasant farmers. Both landed conservatives and smallholders were willingto overcome all opposition to the organic nation-state by employing violence.10

As Preston further shows, the Republican state was assailed not only by elitesbut by anarchist insurrectionism which (alongside the tendency of elements of thePOUM) insisted that violence maintained the revolutionary morale of militantsand the workers in general. The Republics wartime leaders, however, continuedto judge success according to their ability to attract support from foreign democ-racies in order to end the conflict. The rebel forces meanwhile measured progressaccording to the number of enemies liquidated. The rebel campaign was thereforeno mere war of pacification; the war for Franco and his fellow military rebels waspurposely broadened and prolonged with the aim of purging the nation of the anti-Spain. Total war meant glorification of violence, systematic categorization oftargets for liquidation, indifference to the suffering of those subjected to vio-lence, dehumanization of victims (through rape, barbaric disposal of bodies andceremonies of shaming) and mechanization of terror (at least to the extent of uti-lizing radio and newspaper for propaganda and codifying thousands of records anddocuments as evidence of political crimes).

Prestons use of the word holocaust, as he makes clear, is not intended to equatethe Spanish war experience with the destruction of European Jewry during Nazioccupation (pp. xixii). A key purpose, however, is to record the scale of the brutal-ity and killing. In the face of much pressure to forget the painful past, much of thebook does what is necessary: to describe mass murder in detail. Although somecommentators have used the problematic term genocide to describe Francoistattempts at cultural destruction, the concept is not deployed here.11 The well-known UN Genocide Convention of 1948 required proof of an intent to destroy,in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. Exclusionof explicit reference to political communities as victimized targets from this defi-nition owed much to the awkward position of some of the formulating states (par-ticularly the Soviet Union) because of their own propensity to repress groups onpolitical grounds. In Spain, moreover, there was no broad identity between the pol-itical collective targeted by the military rebels and ethnic or national groups. Thislack of an alignment of ethnic and political categories of enemies was qualified,of course, by the rebels destruction of Guernica and other open towns in theBasque Country and by the killing by Francoist holy warriors of Basque priestsand Catalan Catholics during the civil war. For the rebels, the unitary nation-statetrumped religion as justification for liquidation even though Catholicism was akey ideological resource for conservative nationalism.

The anti-Spain was thus constituted in part by regionalists but primarily byliberal Republicans, freemasons and their ideas, which were signifiers of a culture

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of Enlightenment modernity. Such ideas were viewed as being as foreign to Spain asthe leftist ideas espoused by socialists, Marxists or anarchists and because they wereperceived as inviting the left and the workers to foment class war and social revolu-tion. The determination to purge the Fatherland of this liberal and leftist culture andthe dehumanizing barbarity of the violenceoften gendered violence, as in the ubi-quitous shaving of the heads and parading of shamed Republican women duringthe liberation of communities by male rebel forcescame together in thetheory and practice of political cleansing.12 Although references by the rebels to eth-nicity and race were common, therefore, the relationship of the purge to ethnicity iscomplex. For social elites, organic nationalism possessed an important ethnicelement in spite of the absence of any distinct minority racial groups, as such,within the country by the twentieth century. But, in reality, the conflict of sover-eignty in Spain by the 1930s revolved largely around social class. Racial and gen-dered tropes were primarily representational of class fear and the venomous loathingmany elites felt for the restless and revolutionary working class. Ethnic and genderrepresentations were mobilized in the pursuit of political objectives.13 Womenand the alleged enfeebled masculinity of liberals and the leftbecame signifiersof the gender and class disordering viewed by elites as synonymous with theRepublic. The widespread use of rape in the process of occupation by rebels wasabout dehumanizing victims prior to murder rather than having specifically ethnicor biological motives, although it was also about demonstrating domination interms both of gender and of social class.

More research is needed on the relation between macro- and micro-level pro-cesses, although Preston goes some way towards reconstructing the repressiveprocedures (not least on the Republican side). The story on both sides is one ofthe coming together of top-down intention and interactive responses from theground up. Any putative plan of extermination (as we know from severalother national cases) has to be sought in the documentary traces left to us andin this complex coming together of intention and responses. The dynamics ofwar were over-determined by the pre-war politics of nation and state as discussedhere; but the nature of the violence is also a function of the relationship betweenpre-existing political, military and class cultures and structures and the actions anddecisions of power wielders and brokers amid the conflict. In the Republican zone,internal restraints had evaporated as a result of the coup and reconstituting a fra-mework for control proved intractable; for the rebels, in contrast, there was littleattempt to impose restraints, either internally or externally. Constituencies thatheld the Catholic nation-state to be sacred were ripe for mobilization behind vio-lence. Key groups became habituated to drastic measures. The fantastical pre-warobjectives of brutalized military officers, landowners and fascists became practicalgoals and were pursued with alacrity from the very top. Social responses, in thecontext of civil war, were significant, not least in the willingness of citizens todenounce acquaintances or neighbours. Wielders of power gained a level ofconsent to violence as a result of a brew of ideological dissemination, opportunismand fear in the face of the demonstrably growing military, political and economicpower of the rebels.

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Ultimately, in Spain, those segregated as categorical political enemies in theaftermath of the war could be gradually and partially assimilated, in contrast toracial community aliens in other states. In postwar Spain assimilation would bea long and unnecessarily painful process, demanding (so Francoists argued)decades of dictatorship, repression and control of war memories by thevictors. The effects of Francos own reluctance unto his dying days to bringabout full reconciliation would be partially offset by the material sacrificesmade by the defeated and fortuitous economic development from the 1960sonwards.14

HELEN GRAHAMThe undefeated? Violence and the afterlife of Francoism

In his comprehensive and unflinching book, Paul Preston, Britains foremost his-torian of modern Spain, puts before an Anglophone readership the scale and inten-sity of Spains violent experience of state and nation-making in the twentiethcentury. Two substantial questions immediately pose themselves: first, why thisprocess was so vastly brutal; and second, given that it was so, why all subsequenttelling has remained for so long at the margins of the broader contemporary his-toriography in English. Even today comparative and transnational studies dealingwith extremely violent states and societies rarely (ever?) refer to twentieth-centurySpain. Even in those focusing specifically on the relationship between masskilling, ultra-nationalist projects and state making in interwar Europe, the (atbest) stock or passing reference to Spain is usually jarringly at odds with theanalytical and bibliographical sophistication of the main account. Or else it is posi-tioned equally askew by having as sole mention a flat and desiccated reference toSpain as the cockpit of international diplomacy or as the prologue to worldwar (as if foreign intervention affected only the substance of internationalrelations) and whichoddlyalways seems to function to allow the compara-tive account to move entirely away from Spain to ensuing examples of Nazipolitical adventurism, these subject to quite a different level of holistic methodo-logical analysis.

Nazi and fascist intervention was an immediate and crucial factor shapingviolent state and nation building in Spain. First, because it permitted Francoand his fellow army rebels to salvage a failing coup, which, in its original formof country-wide garrison rebellions, had met large-scale ad hoc urban resistance.But Hitler and Mussolini provided the aircraft to ensure the swift delivery to main-land Spain of Francos colonial Army of Africa, composed of indigenous mercen-aries commanded by Spanish career officers (Africanistas). This interventiongifted the rebels the standing army which effectively rescued the coup from obliv-ion. Second, continuing Axis intervention provided the military hardware thatmade possible the rebels escalation to full-scale war. This imperial entanglementwas integral (qualitatively as well as quantitatively) to the potential for vast newatrocities across the country in what rapidly became a complex, multi-directionaldynamic of terror, criss-crossing back and forth between civilian front and the

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developing conventional military front, just as it moved back and forth betweenthe evolving rebel/Francoist zone and the territory slowly being rearticulated asthe Republic. Foreign intervention was instrumental in the making of new mean-ings and sources of legitimation for the violencewhether perpetrated by therebels or their opponentswhich in turn became pivotal to the emerging strategiesof state and nation building implemented by the victorious Francoist coalition.15

Under the dynamic of increasing material aid from Germany and Italy, and ofsubsequent Soviet intervention in response to it, the war in Spain took on otherforms too, including a series of major battlefield confrontationsthe war oftwo sides that to this day remains enshrined in Western memory. But as PaulPreston reminds us, the war also continued throughout in the deeper mode inwhich it had originated with the coup of 1718 July 1936as a military offensiveagainst an evolving civil society and against levelling social and political changesthat the rebel leaders feared and loathed. Behind them stood their own fearful andenraged civilian support base, among patrician elites, conservative provincialtownsfolk and inland peasantry. But for all this, what made actual war possiblewas the availability and preparedness of a military leadership to catalyse andstructure nationally these hatreds and fears. Without this military leadership andarticulationhowever intense the emotions inhabiting the social coalitions forand against change, and whatever sporadic extra-parliamentary violence was com-mitted (by the supporters or opponents of reform)the outcome would not havebeen war but some form of political accommodation, however long drawn-out anddifficult that road.

This original, and also ongoing, war as envisaged by the rebel military leader-ship needed no conventional battlefields, for its targets were from the start pre-eminently other civilian constituencies. The war was everywhere, because sotoo was this enemy. The conspirators determination to deploy terror from theinitiation of the coup was made clear in the prior orders of its director, GeneralMola, to eliminate without scruples or hesitation all who do not think as wedo,16 which of course meant that among those first in the firing line would bemany army officersoften those of more liberal hue, but also political conserva-tives who took seriously their oath of allegiance to the established (Republican)power. The opening section of The Spanish holocaust (titled Theorists of exter-mination) extensively charts and analyses the ideological-discursive genealogyof this fundamentalist logic, in what also constitutes a major original contributionto the current debate over how Francoism can most adequately be definedadebate that has long foundered amid the historical (and intellectual) sterilities ofdiscussions of the fascist minimum. The goals of the Spanish military coupwere of breathtaking intentto take total control of polity and society in orderto reverse modernity. Prestons book tells the harrowing story of this waragainst change as it unfolded against civilians across the entirety of Spains terri-tory. As such, it constitutes an empirical scholarly achievement that is unparal-leled within the specialist historiography in any language. Even in areas wherethere was no resistance to the coup, the new military authorities deployedterror, presiding over an extermination, mainly perpetrated by co-opted civilian

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death squads and vigilantes, of those sectors associated with Republican changenot only the politically active, or those who had directly benefited from redistribu-tive land or social and labour reform, but also those who symbolized cultural trans-formation: progressive teachers, self-educated workers, new women. As Prestonshows, all these sectors were perceived by the Africanista commanders as akin toinsubordinate colonial subjects. General Queipo de Llano, whose troops laid wasteto south-western Spain in the summer of 1936, called this culture war the purifi-cation of the Spanish people. His troops waged war largely on civiliansfor therural popular militias were rarely more than motley-armed locals. There was asyet no reconstituted Republican army in existence, the coup having induced thecollapse of the security forces and army across the territory where the rebellionfailed.

The uses of violenceImplicit in Queipos comment, as previously in others made by Generals Mola andFranco, was some level of awareness that their rebellion could not be an old-stylepalace coup of the sort that had once been common in Spain, because by the 1930sit already had a highly mobilized society, acutely polarized in both social-culturaland ideological termsboth for and against the rebels.17 By the summer of 1936many constituent sectors of the anti-reform coalition were mentally ready forincorporation to a violent defence of a traditional or organic nation-state(post-coup they would provide members for the paramilitary death squads).Even so, the military conspirators never staked their rebellion on these forces.The evidence of significant popular pro-Republican reform mobilization wastoo greatindeed the revolutionary general strike of 1934, although defeatedeverywhere, convinced Franco and other military hardliners that a conscriptpeninsular army was not to be trusted and that the colonial Army of Africa hadto be the core of the future coup attempt, after its successful deployment in vio-lently suppressing the general strike in the northern coalmining region of Asturias.

The high level of domestic resistance to the military agenda is importantbecause it signals just how much structural and social change had already occurredin Spain in the 1920s and 1930s compared to other southern European countries.In Spain, the radio-listening, professional Republican association-joining urbanmiddling classes, combined with an army of internal labour migrants from coun-tryside to city, had already introduced a more substantial challenge to older formsof social and political order than was to be found elsewhere in either Portugal orGreece. The Second Spanish Republic, born in April 1931, with its clear vocationto speak for the city, was itself a product of this development, as well as a genera-tor. And what the Second Republic offered by way of reform was not just of thevery tangible sortland, labour and welfare reforms (crucial though they were inbeginning a structural redistribution of social and economic power). It also offeredqualitative change, atmosphere-changing measures, for example the seculariza-tion measures, especially attempts to secularize the streets and public space,and the provision of alternative ceremonial (civil marriage and burial, andabove all, of education and particularly co-education, the education of girls and

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boys together in the same classroom). These things were developed by the Repub-lican authorities, but not imposed into a vacuumwhich is to say, they found aready audience, as too did the Republics nurturing of a relative urban eclecti-cism/cosmopolitanism and its attendant freedoms, including those related togender and sexuality. Spain was not Weimar, of course, but even so it was lightyears away from the much more limited initiatives and audiences for suchthings available elsewhere in southern Europe. It was also more than just amatter of urban cultural change, for the Republic, notwithstanding its many pol-itical and strategic limitations, was altering the balance of power beyond, in therural depths of la Espana profunda. This met opposition among the conservativesmallholding peasantry of the inland north and among many provincial townsfolk,again especially (though not exclusively) in the inland northern half of Spain, whowere deeply hostile to Republican cultural values. But elsewhere on the stronglyfederalist eastern/south-eastern sea board and in the southern half of Spain wheremass landlessness obtained, the Republics message of change elicited a deepresponse. Above all it was the Republics language of political rights that didthis. The Republic was the first regime that assumed ordinary people had rights.And that language of rights the Republic spoke, and more importantly, allowedto be spoken, permitted people in small-town and village Spain who dared to,to think differently. This, perhaps more than anything else, was what drove patri-cian Spain to sheer apoplexy. It was against this supreme perceived threat to olderways of being and thinking in deep Spain that a fear-ridden patrician and also apopulist crusade conservatism united and rose behind the military coup of 1718July 1936.

It is crucial to bear in mind this complicated picture. For it was this relativedepth and complexity of social and cultural change that had penetrated intovillage and small-town Spain, the range of modern cultural collateral alreadypresent by 1936the result of a cumulative process of social change across the1920s and 1930sthat explains the violence of the Francoist counter-response.The armed conflict of 193639 upped the ante hugely in terms of making newmeanings to justify extreme state-led violence. But this prior context waspivotal and needs underscoring: it is the relative complexity of Spains alternativesocial and cultural solidarities, already by 1936, that explains the force of the Fran-coist blast (and the prison universe of later), because so much had to be defini-tively destroyed. Even though Spain was not Germany in terms of the densityof its civil society, the German case is a more illuminating and appropriate com-parator here to explain what happened than are Spains putative southern Euro-pean homologues.

Indeed, specifically in terms of pre-war political mobilization across society,1930s Spain had more intensive levels than did Germany. Without the widespreadpopulist conservative social and political mobilization, often in organizationslinked with or justified by the institutional Catholic Church, it is impossible toexplain why and how the numerically stretched military rebels were so rapidlyable to avail themselves of substantial civilian paramilitary support to enacttheir purification. According to their own discursive explanations for the coup,

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these sectors had risen in a crusade, in the name of the true nation and indefence of which they were prepared to kill.

In Spain, then, the warthat is to say, the deep war that predated and outlastedthe battlefield clash18was the extremely violent result of three convergingfactors: jagged and acutely uneven internal metropolitan development; a colonial(and to a lesser extent peninsular) military elite prepared to kill the human bearersof change; and the availability of an already independently socially and politicallymobilized populist conservative base, driven by a powerful intimate narrative offear which interpreted the transformative and levelling reform of the Republicas the end of a cherished and familiar world, indeed as the end of Spain.All this was hugely potentialized by foreign weaponry, as it was too by thecycle of retributive killing unleashed by the military rebellion in Republican ter-ritory, for once there was war then it engulfed everything; atrocity was everywhereand every side had its perpetrators. In such an arenaand also given the verydepth and extent of the mobilized social and cultural collateral of theenemythen what emerged after Francos internationally enabled militaryvictory in 1939 could not be any return to traditional authoritarianism in a demo-bilized society. That society had long since ceased to exist, even before the civilwar. And through war, religionthe alliance of throne and altarhad alsobecome something else. For the victorious Francoist coalition, the unitarynation-state trumped religion as justification for liquidation.19 This was some-thing newand modern in spite of itself.

Afterwards: the war Francoism madeAfter Francos military victory, the mass murdering dimension inherent in war-forged Francoism became fully apparent, as the final section of Paul Prestonsstudy explores. In a bid to create the homogeneous nation of which the conspira-tors dreamed, based on traditional values and social deference, the regimeengaged in the killing, mass imprisonment and social segregation of the Republi-can population. To do so, the regime exhorted ordinary Spaniards nationwide todenounce their compatriots crimes to military tribunals. Tens of thousands didsoout of a combination of political conviction, grief and loss, social prejudice,opportunism and fear. Thus did the Franco regime, born of a military coup thatitself triggered the killing, pose as the bringer of justice. But this was justiceturned on its head, given the notorious lack of fit between the acts of wartime vio-lence themselves and those denounced and tried for themno corroboration wasrequired nor any real investigative process undertaken. But, as Preston shows,matching culprits to crimes was not the point of the exercise. Tens of thousandswere tried merely for their political or social alignment with the Republicasone prosecutor declared: I do not care, nor do I even want to know, if you areinnocent or not of the charges made against you.20 This was the Francoregimes fatal moment: it made the choice of a toxic legitimating strategythrough which it mobilized a social base of perpetrators, building on their fearsand losses sustained during the war, tying them to the regime in perpetuity,while at the same time it criminalized the Republican population, perpetrating

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an abuse of human rights on a vast scale. More damaging still, the regime, buoyedup and legitimated by the Cold War, then kept alive these binary categories fornearly forty years, through its apartheid policies and an endlessly reiterated nation-alist discourse of martyrs and barbarians. Through this, the regime tied one cat-egory of extra-judicial dead to itself: the martyrs, those killed in Republicanterritory, were cast in this nationalist script as the sacred dead; they wereexhumed in the 1940s, given ceremonial reburial and perpetually celebrated asthe eternal value, the lodestone of the dictatorship. This meant that thepostwar dictatorship was founded upon, and demanded, the endless reiterationof a past fracture, so that it remained the present, with devastating consequencesfor the future. What is more, these embedded mind games of dictatorship emergedlargely unscathed from the dismantling of regime structures after Francos death,with Spains transition to a parliamentary democracy in the late 1970s. Forcomplex and highly disparate historical reasons, but which all relate to theacute social limitations of that transition, as well as to the endurance of particularnarratives of social and economic change constructed during Spains vertiginousindustrialization of the late 1950s and 1960s, the same dictatorial mind gamesremain powerfully alive in the field of memory in Spain today.21 They havebeen further boosted by the peculiar asymmetries of the post(?)-Cold War inter-national order since 1989, as an increasing tide of right-wing populist nationalismacross Europe now facilitates the full-on recuperation of Francoism inside Spainin the inevitable form of a domestically serviceable myth. As in the 1930s, so tootoday Spain emerges as a touchstone, its historical reckoning blocked by a conti-nental conjuncture.

JORGE MARCOThe Spanish holocaust: a review22

The Spanish holocaust was published in the spring of 2011 in Spain in both Cas-tilian and Catalan. It was a commercial success from the outset, becoming a best-selling historical essay with successive editions. Two years on, readers still enjoythe book. What can we attribute this success to? From my perspective, there arefour key reasons: the timing of publication; the authors formidable reputationin Spain; an open and long-running debate on the concept of the holocaust;and the books inherent value.

Since the mid 1990s, the Spanish have begun to revisit their own traumatic past.This phenomenon has become even more pronounced since the early years of thetwenty-first century. The role of memory and Europes violent past was examinedby academics and more widely by European society in the 1960s. In Spain, due tothe longevity of the Franco dictatorship (193677), this kind of debate was delayed.The transition to democracy in Spain (197582) did not initiate new debates.Within a paradigm of national reconciliation, the dominant discourse had twoaxes: forgiveness and forgetting. In the mid 1990s, a new generation born sincethe advent of democracy began to break this paradigm of silence. A generationof grandchildren (generacion de los nietos) began to wonder what had happened

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to their grandparents and why there was a persistent silence about the past. In thepublic sphere this included the principles of transitional justice, namely an emphasison truth, justice and reparation. The new discourse of memory-inspired social move-ments caused generational and social fractures in Spain, plunging the traumatic pastinto the centre of political and public debate. The Spanish holocaust was such asuccess because it appeared at a time when there was great public interest in theissue of violence during the Civil War and dictatorship.

The success of The Spanish holocaust cannot be attributed to this alone. Therehave been hundreds of books covering violence in the civil war and dictatorshipsince the 1980s, with a marked increase in history publications in the last twodecades. We must then ask why, with so many comparable books on themarket, has Paul Prestons book been a bestseller? In my view there are two comp-lementary answers to this question. One would be the enormous prestige of theauthor in Spain. During the years of Francos dictatorship only those favourableto the regime could study the Spanish Civil War so the role of foreign historianswas instrumental in the development of Spanish contemporary twentieth-centuryhistoriography. British Hispanists have been noted for their excellent research andPaul Preston has become the most prominent of this group. The fundamental rolethat his historical writing has played has been recognized in contemporary Spainin the academy and in society as a whole. At this point we cannot, however, ignorethe perception that the Spanish society has about its own past. Questions have beenraised in social sciences about objectivity and subjectivity, which has beenenhanced by the language of postmodernism. This question is even more heigh-tened when dealing with the history of the present day and even more sowhen it comes to violence and trauma. There is an embedded notion in some quar-ters in Spain that Spanish historians are not yet able to write objectively about thecivil war and the Franco dictatorship because of the recent nature of the events,which are still encumbered by subjectivity. Accordingly, foreign historianscould be seen as having a greater objectivity, due to their geographical andemotional distance. By such a reasoning, The Spanish holocaust, as the work ofa distinguished British historian, could offer a better guarantee of objectivitythan other possibly contaminated interpretations or narratives.

A third key to understanding the success of the book is the controversy thaterupted in the media and in academic circles in Spain surrounding its title and,in particular, the choice of the word holocaust. Paul Preston has insisted thathis use of the term holocaust is based on the definition of the word given bythe dictionary of the Royal Spanish Language Academy and the Oxford EnglishDictionary: the destruction and large-scale slaughter of human beings. Asaround half a million people met a violent death during the Spanish civil war,about 300,000 in the battlefield and about 200,000 in the rear, the choice of thisword would seem appropriate. After the war, between 20,000 and 50,000people were killed by the Franco dictatorship, either by execution, maltreatmentor food privation in prisons. This number does not include the large number ofthe defeated who were interned in concentration camps and prisons, convictedby military courts or simply forced into exile.

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Despite this undoubtedly violent context, the use of the word holocaust stillreverberated around Spain. In many respects this echoed the bitter debates overthe use of concepts such as genocide and holocaust in countries with similarlytraumatic histories. Newspaper columns, social media and public meetings fuelleda debate for or against Preston, particularly with regards to the use of this termin the Spanish case. Moreover, there was discussion about the validity of compar-ing the Jewish Holocaust with contemporary events. Despite the fact that there hasbeen some theoretical study on violence, there had been hitherto very little interestin comparative genocide studies in the academic sphere in Spain.

The publication of Prestons book and public controversy about the use of theterm holocaust led to a new debate and the adoption of new approaches tothe theoretical frameworks by which we can interpret violence and broaden thefield of study. Perhaps the best example is the congress held in October 2012 atthe Complutense University of Madrid entitled Genocides, Holocausts, Extermi-nation, which was coordinated by myself and the late Julio Arostegui, an impor-tant founder of the study of political violence in Spain, and Gutmaro GomezBravo. The purpose of the congress was to address the debate that The Spanishholocaust had raised. The fundamental idea was to question the utility of broadtheoretical and conceptual repertoires that currently exist in the social sciencesto interpret the phenomenon of historical violence. At the same time the real com-plexity of the issue was acknowledged, because such concepts transcend academicdebate and are used in other contexts from the social to the legal. The congresshighlighted the importance of theoretical frameworks in studying the traumaticpast, but also served as a warning on the danger of endless debates about cat-egories. More relevant than the concepts are the debates around them. That iswhy fields such as genocide studies and collective violence are so pertinent.From this perspective The Spanish holocaust has served to reawaken bothsociety and academia, enlivening debates about the forms of representation andinterpretation of the past in Spain. This is a merit that few books can claim.

But the most important factor that allows us to understand the success ofThe Spanish holocaust lies in the books virtues. First I would highlight the extra-ordinary narrative that Paul Preston has written. He is an author who we alreadyknew could write in a compelling and persuasive manner. And The Spanish holo-caust does not disappoint. The way in which he has sensitively and meticulouslydescribed the violence that occurred during the Spanish civil war and its aftermathcould leave no one indifferent. This is a narrative that allows the reader to under-stand and interpret not only the motivations of perpetrators, but also the abject suf-fering, terror and fear of the victims. Such is Prestons skill as a narrator that thereader seems to be able to even hear the breathing of the characters. But his story-telling ability goes further, making the reader appreciate the parts of the book thatcould be seen a priori as more arduous. Writing quality is always important for thesuccess for a book, but in the case of the Spanish market this is even more so.Spanish historians have not traditionally been concerned with prose style, whichhas led to some disaffection on the part of the public with academic literature.

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The Spanish holocaust is a lesson to Spanish historians on how it is possible toseamlessly blend research and dissemination.

A second strength is the encyclopaedic character of the book. One could almostsay that any act of violence that occurred during the civil war has been documen-ted in the book. This of course is an exaggeration, but emphasizes my generalpoint on the depth and range of examples given, which cover the entire Spanishgeographical extent. This is thanks to Prestons scholarship. A simple review ofthe range of literature used demonstrates his erudition. This must have been adaunting task given the vast international historiography on the Spanish civil war.

Despite its vast coverage, The Spanish holocaust is a systematic book. Since the1980s Spanish historians have made a concerted effort to write the history of vio-lence in Spain during the civil war and Francos dictatorship. That is why there hasbeen a profusion of studies at local and regional levels. This type of approach hasallowed us to become familiar with the dynamics of small-scale violence in greatdetail, but has sometimes hampered an overarching and total interpretation of thephenomenon. This trend has been mitigated in recent years thanks to the publi-cation of several works whose purpose is to analyse the different logics of violencenationwide. The Spanish holocaust is part of this group of books, but it has thevirtue of being able to combine its analysis on two scales: local/regional andnational. At the same time, it brings together the study of violence in the rear-guard during the Spanish civil war, among both the rebels and Republicans. Inthis way, the author has been able to synthesize and master the basic lines ofinterpretation that have been developing for decades in Spanish historiography,of which he himself is an essential part. He analyses the violence in the tworears with assiduity, but rejects the simplistic uniform interpretation and the fra-tricidal war narrative constructed by the Franco regime in the 1960s in whichall those involved committed excesses in equal measure. The differences can beseen in the quantity of victims, but more importantly on a qualitative level.There were perpetrators in both rear-guards, but they did not behave accordingto a similar logic. Violence committed in the rear by the pro-Franco revoltresponded to the logic of extermination and cleansing promoted by governmentinstitutions. The Republican rear-guard followed a revolutionary logic that wasessentially triggered by the military uprising. Faced with the loss of a monopolyof violence by the state, a new set of non-state micro-powers were responsiblefor violence in the Republican rear-guard. Overall, there would be the samelogic of violence among the rebels and Republicans and Preston consistently illus-trates this point in the book with qualification where necessary.

In relation to the logics of violence, Paul Preston has made a formidable analy-sis of the theorists of extermination in the second chapter. The authors argumentis that policies of extermination that took place during the civil war were not spon-taneous and did not take place in the heat of battle or as a response to revolutionaryviolence, but derived from an established political culture that was deeply rootedin the Spanish right. It was a political culture that became further radicalized in thecontext of the Second Republic. The reform programme from the governmentadvocated by Republicans and socialists exacerbated hatred and contempt

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within the Spanish right towards their political enemies. Through a process ofdehumanization, these internal enemies, described as against Spain, redand Marxist, were marked out for elimination. Their ideologies were interpretedas foreign, of Jewish origin, moro (a derogatory term for the people of Morocco)and Berber. These references had a great impact on the collective imaginationbecause the Spanish colonial army had been involved in an intense war inMorocco in previous years. The organized working classes were seen as amob with Eastern and Semitic qualities, giving rise to particular racial theoriesaccording to which anyone who embraced the ideals of the Republicans or the leftwas worth no more than an African in Spain. A set of theories that developed theidea of the social and racial inferiority of the internal enemy ultimately formedthe legitimating discourse of their extermination during the war.

A key episode addressed in The Spanish holocaust is the massacre at Paracuel-los, to which Chapter 10 is dedicated. That event is of great significance as thelargest massacre in the Republican zone. Between 2,200 and 2,500 prisonerswere killed between 7 November and 3 December 1936. It held an important sym-bolic place in the imaginary of Franco and exposed the potential culpability of oneof the most prominent future leaders of the Communist Party of Spain: SantiagoCarrillo (about whom Paul Preston has just published a biography). The authormasterfully shows all the dynamics that eventually converged in the massacre:the siege of the city by Francos troops; the Republican governments flightfrom the capital; the precarious situation of the Republican state; the multipli-cation of micro-autonomous powers; the fear that the prisoners would fall intothe hands of Franco and could assist in the occupation of the city (several ofthem were military); and the systematic bombing of Madrid and its impact onan uneasy and vengeful population. Finally, Preston rightly considers that theissue of responsibility cannot be solved by naming an individual or a smallnumber of people. In fact, a massacre like Paracuellos, which took place over aprolonged period and in which different methods were employed, required theinvolvement of multiple actors. We should therefore talk about collective respon-sibility.

To conclude, I would like to dwell on one of the few points on which I disagreewith the author: his vision of the anarchist movement. And I particularly want tofocus on the role given to the violence that occurred in the Republican rear-guard.While I in no way deny the important role that revolutionary violence playedwithin anarchism, in The Spanish holocaust it becomes hegemonic. Reading thebook leaves us with the impression that virtually all the violence in the Republicanrear-guard was committed by anarchistson which is projected a homogeneousimage of hotheads, fanatics and criminals. Part of this interpretation comesfrom speeches collected in the anarchist press, which certainly was much moreradical and supportive of violence than the press of other political formations.In this regard, recent research has shown clearly how revolutionary violencefrom below was held by the whole spectrum of the labour movement fromsocialist to communist militants, not excluding of course the anarchists.Members of republican parties, sectors of the middle classes as well as individuals

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with no previous political affiliation participated. In fact, many of those involvedin violence in 1936 were revolutionized and this became their rite of passage intopolitical action. Revolutionary violence played a role in the socialization of theRepublican rear-guard. This socialization included socialist, communist andrepublican activists. Finally, the last chapter is devoted to the postwar periodand analyses the efficacy of violence during the dictatorship of Franco. An invest-ment in terror during the civil war and its aftermath ensured the social peace of thecemeteries for nearly forty years.

We could say that The Spanish holocaust is Paul Prestons masterpiece, but thisclaim would lead to two problems. First, it is difficult to choose one masterpiecefrom an author who has written so widely, with several key titles on the history ofSpain. Second, his tireless research work suggests that he will offer us new booksin the future, which we will anticipate with great pleasure.

Reply to the forum by Paul Preston

I am very grateful to the colleagues who have participated in this exercise for theirperceptive and appreciative readings of the book. In the main, there is very little inwhat they say with which I would disagree. Accordingly, in response to the invita-tion to comment on the points made in their articles, I restrict my remarks to fourmain issues. These are discussion of the books title, of my reasons for writing it,of my treatment of atrocities within the Republican zone and the prominent roleattributed in the book to the anarchists, and finally of the appropriate terminologyto define collectively the crimes against civilians carried out in both zones.

First of all, there is the question of the books title and its use of word holo-caust. Professor Labanyi writes: He is not the first to compare the Francoistrepression with the Nazi extermination of the Jews. This is something that I expli-citly do not do in the book, or indeed anywhere. I wrote in the book that my use ofthe word holocaust is not intended to equate what happened within Spain withwhat happened throughout the rest of continental Europe under German occu-pation but rather to suggest that it be examined in a broadly comparativecontext. Professor Labanyi goes on to say, rightly, that [t]he tendency inmemory studies to analyse any traumatic event through the template of the Holo-caust runs the risk of homogenizing atrocities whose contexts may have been verydifferent. As Professor Graham commented in her review of the book in TheIndependent (2 March 2012):

His use of holocaust in the books title will rightly spark debate. But Prestons intention isnot to equate Spain with the Holocaust, but rather to effect a category shift in how peoplethink about and conceptualize what actually happened in Spain, in order to suggest parallelsand resonances between the cases which allow of a deeper understanding of Europes darkmid-twentieth century as a whole, and of the mechanisms of human violence itself.

Similarly, Michael Richards commented in his piece, Prestons use of the wordholocaust, as he makes clear, is not intended to equate the Spanish war experi-ence with the destruction of European Jewry during Nazi occupation. A key

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purpose, however, is to record the scale of the brutality and killing. In the face ofmuch pressure to forget the painful past, much of the book does what is necess-ary: to describe mass murder in detail. Indeed, Jo Labanyi herself goes on to saythat a comparison with the experience of Nazi-occupied Europe was not made:Second, use of the term holocaust forces readers to set the Francoist repressionin the context of the contemporaneous Nazi extermination project. Prestons statedaim is not to equate the extra-judicial killings in Spain with those in the Nazi deathcamps, but to invite comparative study. Jorge Marco makes the point that thescale of the killing in Spain more than justifies the use of the word holocaust.

Professor Labanyi quotes me as saying that the main reason for the bookstitle is the antisemitic rhetoric of the 1936 coups leaders and supporters.Having said this at the start, his book does not make further mention of the Holo-caust. This significantly overstates what I think and what I actually wrote. In thecontext of a series of reasons for using the word in the books title, I stated: More-over, in its choice, I was influenced by the fact that those who justified the slaugh-ter of innocent Spaniards used an anti-Semitic rhetoric and frequently claimed thatthey had to be exterminated because they were the instruments of a Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy.

Professor Labanyi comments on another element of the books title:

Prestons narrative does not make much of the implications of the term inquisition, apartfrom mentioning that Francos 1939 end-of-year speech claimed that Spains late fifteenth-century Catholic monarchs, who founded the Inquisition to extirpate residual Jewish prac-tices among Jewish converts to Christianity as well as expelling from Spain those Jewswho refused to convert, had paved the way for Nazi antisemitic legislation (p. 471); andthat the pro-Franco eugenicist Antonio Vallejo Nagera, notoriously obsessed with cleansingthe race of the red gene, also took the Inquisition as his model (pp. 514515). By contrast,the term extermination forms the backbone of his book.

This is true as far as further reference to the Spanish Inquisition is concerned.Nevertheless, the use of the word in the books title was intended to evoke the factthat interrogation, torture and imprisonment in appalling conditions were a crucialpart of the experience on both sides.

Moving on to the purpose of the book, Professor Labanyi states correctly thatPreston makes no statements about the desirability or feasibility of prosecutingthose perpetrators who are still alive. But in effect he mounts an indictment ofall those responsible, on both sides, for violence against civilians, through hisrelentless assemblage of atrocities. In fact, for a number of reasons, I think it isneither desirable nor feasible to prosecute those perpetrators who happen to bealive or can be found. The book is about memory, not revenge. It is abouttelling a story that has not been adequately told at all outside Spain and onlywith acute political partiality within Spain. Without acknowledgement of whathappened, there can be no closure for the families of the victims. In any case,the majority of the perpetrators on both sides are dead. A large proportion ofthose on the left were either executed as the rebels took over territory or elseescaped into exile never to return. Those on the right are legally protected by

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the existing amnesty law of October 1977. Even if this were not the case, their pro-secution would do nothing for the consolidation of democracy in Spain. Moreover,the sight of ninety-year-olds being tried would be highly unedifying.

An element in the books genesis was the sense that a major weakness ofSpanish democracy is precisely the failure to come to terms with the nationalpast. As Graham eloquently puts it, the Franco regimes endless reiteration ofa past fracture has meant that in Spain today, the civil war triggered three quartersof a century ago is still the past that has not passed away. That this remains thecase is, to some considerable extent, because of the hostility shown by the conser-vative Partido Popular currently in government in Spain to popular movements forthe recovery of historical memory. With great generosity and some exaggeration,Professor Graham wrote in her review that Prestons study is history as a publicgood, a substitute for the truth and reconciliation process that has not taken place.

Moving on to the issue of the books differential treatment of the atrocities onboth sides, an initial clarification is crucial. Professor Labanyi uses the termRepublican atrocities. This is an understandable shorthand. However, I believethat it is important to avoid the binary of rebel atrocities/Republican atrocitiessince the central difference between what happened behind the lines in each zonewas intentionality, even more so than the immense quantitative differences. Massterror and atrocities were deliberate instruments of policy wielded by the rebelauthorities whereas atrocities within the Republican zone were committedagainst the wishes of the government. In this context, Professor Labanyi com-ments: Preston insists on calling the nationalists (the technical name of the alli-ance of Monarchists, Carlists and fascists who supported the military uprising)the rebels, to make the point that they were the instigators of the violence.The word Nacionales, usually rendered nationalists in English, was hardlythe technical name. It was a self-proclaimed propaganda device intended togive the impression that the military rebels were the defenders of national integrityagainst foreign (principally Russian) intervention, while also masking the extentto which they were dependent on German and Italian assistance.

Three of the commentators make the point that my account is hard on the anar-chists. Dr Marco states:

In this regard, recent research has shown clearly how revolutionary violence from belowwas held by the whole spectrum of the labour movement from socialist to communist mili-tants, not excluding of course the anarchists. Republican Party members, sectors of themiddle classes as well as individuals with no previous political affiliation participated. Infact, many of those involved in violence in 1936 were revolutionized and this becametheir rite of passage into political action. Revolutionary violence played a role in the socia-lization of the Republican rear-guard in that the bases were excluded socialists, communistsand Republicans.

Dr Marco is right, although I would argue that the participation of these othergroups in revolutionary violence was far more sporadic and partial than in the caseof the anarchist movement, which was widely committed to the idea of a tabula

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rasa of the old order. There were exceptions, noted in the book, like the role ofsocialists in the repression in Toledo or of communists in Albacete.

Dr Richards also notes that I am critical of the anarchists. He goes on to makethe crucial point that they, with notable exceptions, were guilty of makingdemands on the state in their own interests while at the same time underminingits effectiveness and legitimacy . . . . As Preston further shows, the Republicanstate was assailed not only by elites but by anarchist insurrectionism which (along-side the tendency of elements of the POUM) insisted that violence maintained therevolutionary morale of militants and the workers in general.

Explicitly or implicitly, all four commentators raise issues about the terminol-ogy that might be used to categorize the atrocities described in the bookalthough all do so entirely in terms of the crimes committed by the militaryrebels and their allies. The need to encompass the events on both sides was some-thing that inhibited any inclination that I might have had to blanket definition. Pro-fessor Labanyi concludes her interesting discussion by saying that genocidewould be a better and more appropriate term than holocaust. Preciselybecause I felt that terminological debate would be sterile and detract attentionfrom the real horror, about which few Anglo-Saxon readers are aware, I chose aterm that is widely understood as meaning a mass killing. Professor Grahams dis-cussion of this, both here and in her earlier review, captures my intention accu-rately. She sees the outbreak of war as a military and paramilitary assault on acivil society and constitution