Interrogating Francoism

Reviews / Votes

A first-rate collection of wide-ranging yet coherently integrated essays ... The volume covers much of 20th century Spanish history, coherently inserts Spain's past into the European framework and engages with current historiographical debates. It will be useful not only to undergraduate and postgraduate students but also to all those interested in Spain's difficult past and convulsive present. It certainly deserves a wide readership. * International Brigade Memorial Trust Magazine * Offers a fresh critique of the historiography of the Franco regime ... authoritative and incisive, the arguments posited in this volume could not be more propitious. A volume to pore over and return to over time has resoundingly achieved its original premise, to debunk myths through nuanced reflection and rigorous assessment. And to encourage future historians to take up the challenge to participate in this 'live dialogue with the present'. * Bulletin of Spanish Studies * An impressive team of contributors, with exceptional offerings from representatives of the new generation of historians of contemporary Spain. The book offers fresh insights into Spain's first democracy and the civil war that destroyed it. In the face of attempts, both in Spain and abroad, to sanitise Franco's subsequent dictatorship, this volume highlights once again the regime's brutality and its enduring cultural and political legacies for twenty-first century Spain. This is a fitting tribute to the most recognised historian of contemporary Spain. * Gareth Stockey, Lecturer in Spanish Studies, University of Nottingham, UK * Interrogating Francoism is a fine, authoritative collection of essays that shed light on what the excellent editor, Helen Graham, calls 'Europe's most successful and adaptive dictatorial culture'. Wide-ranging yet coherent, the book spans the crisis of modernisation out of which the dictatorship and its repressed alternative emerged, and the resurgent contemporary nationalism that continues to justify the crimes of the dictatorship, or at least to invalidate the Republic. This volume deserves a much wider readership than Spanish specialists alone because it tells us so very much about Europe entire, and the story is not a pretty one. * Donald Bloxham, Richard Pares Professor of History, University of Edinburgh, UK * Over the past forty years Professor Paul Preston, through his own impressive body of publications and those of his Anglo-Spanish army of former doctoral students, has become the focus of a veritable 'Preston school' of historical scholarship on twentieth-century Spain. This distinguished collective volume, ably edited by Professor Helen Graham, is an altogether fitting tribute to an outstanding career , offering as it does work of range, rigour and 'Prestonian' conviction. As an analysis of Francoism's roots, nature and baleful legacy it constitutes a devastating corrective to the currently fashionable effusions of Spanish 'revisionists'. Its dedicatee could not have asked for more. * Martin Blinkhorn, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Lancaster, UK * This compelling volume is worthy of Paul Preston's four decades of groundbreaking historical research on twentieth-century Spain. The contributors' essays present significant new work on topics as wide-ranging as the role of the Catholic Church and the persistence of Francoist patterns of thought and behavior long after the dictator's death. More important, this book underscores--as Preston has for forty years--three important insights: that Spain's history cannot be understood separate from its European context; that, conversely, historians of Europe cannot relegate Spain to the margins of their narrative; and, finally, that a proper understanding of the way in which the political and cultural tensions of the 1930s played out in Spain during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship continues to have great relevance as Europe is facing one of its most challenging moments in recent history. * Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies, Oberlin College, USA *