Spanish Labour Historiography: 1979–1982

Abstract

In his otherwise excellent study of the labour in the Basque prov inces, Pol?tica Obrera en el Pa?s Vasco, 1880-1923 (Madrid, Turner, 1975), Jaun Pablo Fusi complained of the exaggerated attention that has been paid recently to studies of the labour movement and expressed the fear that the time was coming when Spanish factory workers would be known by name. Seven years later that moment has not yet arrived and Prof. Fusi's fears are still far from being realized. The truth is that Spanish labour history is much less advanced than that of other important European countries. There are very good reasons for this underde velopment. During its nearly 40 years in power the Franco regime undertook to rewrite the nation's recent history and a central part of this operation was the amputation of the role of the labour movement. In these highly unfavourable and inhospitable political conditions historians within Spain tended to turn to other, less politically charged fields, with realistic possibilities for research, which undoubtedly helps explain the great sophistication of economic history. At the same time the foreign, mostly English speaking, historians who worked on modern Spain were drawn to the big events: the Second Republic and the Civil War. Closely related to the historical preferences of the regime is an absence of archival sources inconceivable to the historian of France or Germany, not to men tion Britain or the United States. Much documentation was destroyed, both pur posefully and accidentally, during the Civil War, and more was destroyed after wards by people afraid of being compromised by the possession of subversive materials. During the war Franco's Documentation Retrieval Service followed the army into conquered Republican territory and took all the trade union and political party records on which it could lay its hands to Salamanca where they were incor porated into a police archive used to help persecute reds. Although technically a part of the National Historical Archive, the Salamanca depository was until very recently in the custody of the Guardia Civil and very jealously guarded. It is now open to all historians but the absence of catalogues or serviceable indexes makes research slow and difficult