In the Name of the Martyrs
ABSTRACT This article explores how the Francoist victors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) 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 regime's 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.
A ‘Gigantic Struggle Between Believers and Those Without God’? Catholicism in the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1939
In Spain today, the place of the Catholic Church and the role of the Catholic faith under the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939) remain one of the most bitterly contested aspects in recent history and memory. Behind that confrontation is the Catholic Church hierarchy's continued support for a narrative of ‘good versus evil,’ carried over from the 1930s and portraying the Church as a passive and helpless victim of Republican persecution. But as this article shows, far from a confrontation between ‘good and evil’, the Republic was an arena of social change in which debates around religion and the place of the Church became the lens through which larger political, social, and cultural clashes played out. It suggests that historians must begin to pay much more attention to the reality experienced by many Catholics during the 1930s in order to fully understand the complexities of the Second Republic in peacetime and civil war.
Trueta: surgeon in war and peace
or quotes are paraphrased, losing the colour of the original event. The press itself must take the blame for rather disappointing production: besides many typographical errors, the print is strangely difficult to read. However, Morris Vogel's book is, overall, very useful. He has successfully treated his topic as a social development, where patients and governors, local politicians and ethnic leaders, all take their place with medical men. In that, it is a refreshing piece of social history. Lindsay Granshaw University College London, and St. Mark's Hospital