‘Volvemos a empezar’: Return Journeys of the Spanish maquis

Abstract

Isolated from international events and from the gaze of the world prior to 1945, the end of the global conflict would impel numerous maquis fighters, many of them former members of the French Resistance, on a ‘return journey’ to continue, in their homeland, the struggle against tyranny. This article assesses the representation of the maquis in Spanish film from the 1950s, by which historical moment their most prominent figures, like Vitini and García Granda, had been captured and executed and the maquis had all but disappeared, to the early years of the twenty-first century and the film El laberinto del fauno. Therein, maquis appear as common criminals (bandoleros), as social outcasts who can only be cleansed through suffering, or, in the final years of the Franco regime and the Transition, as a means to prompting a democratic conscience and restoring the collective memory of the Republican resistance.