Francoist nostalgia and memories of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The revisionism of the last decade with regard to the Spanish Civil War is closely related to the emergence of extensive research on Francoist violence and a huge social mobilisation around the recovery of historical memory. The aim of the revisionists is to counteract the effects of this mobilisation, whose purpose is the construction of an alternative memory of the Civil War as well as the social recognition of and dignity for Franco's victims. The phenomenon of revisionism is handicapping the already complex relationship between history and memory, because it has favoured the emergence of another or new collective memory impregnated with Francoist nostalgia, which at the same time is making it easier to use the past as a weapon to stir up present political tensions using stereotypical and simplistic discourse. To understand the traumatic past, historians need to be aware of the limits of these collective memories since they tend to obscure the complexities of the past.