Roundtable on the Spanish Civil War: Introduction

Abstract

In October 2019 the remains of Francisco Franco were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast mausoleum constructed after the Spanish Civil War in the mountains outside of Madrid, and moved to a municipal cemetery. Even in an era of apparently ubiquitous 'memory wars', the controversy surrounding a fascist-era dictator and his victory monument surprised many who had not been following the long-running debates about historical memory within Spain. The event made headlines around the world, briefly drawing attention to the history and legacy of a conflict which, despite being very well known, is not always well understood. The Spanish Civil War is one of the iconic events of Europe's twentieth century. From its outbreak in July 1936 it captured the attention of the world. It has been depicted in countless novels, poems, films and works of art, often produced by those who witnessed it first-hand. And its memory has lived on both inside and outside Spain since the end of the conflict, although in very different ways. The scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is vast. During the Franco era and its aftermath much of the most important historical research emerged from abroad, but over recent decades Spanish historians have built on these foundations to transform our understanding of the conflict. The ways in which the Spanish Civil War is understood and taught by European historians has not always kept pace with this new scholarship. Surveys of the period or edited collections on particular themes of European history often pass over the case of Spain or rely on a limited and often outdated English-language historiography. University curricula often include the Spanish Civil War in modern Europe survey modules or as part of courses on the Second World War, fascism or the interwar crisis. But, again, they often rely on a limited scholarship which doesn't necessarily reflect new developments in the field. University libraries, in the United Kingdom at least, are full of dog-eared copies of Hugh Thomas's survey of the Spanish Civil War, originally published in 1961, but too often lack decent collections of more recent scholarship. For many European historians, and by association for many of their students, the Spanish Civil War and the debates surrounding it are much less familiar than contemporary issues such as Italian and German fascism, Stalinism, Vichy and its memory, the Holocaust, collaboration and resistance and so on. The purpose of this roundtable is therefore twofold. The first is to provide European historians who don't work on Spain with an introduction to some of the key issues and debates currently shaping scholarship on the Spanish Civil War, with a particular focus on situating these debates within their broader European and global contexts. We hope that it showcases some of the innovative new approaches and perspectives which are currently helping to deepen our understanding of the conflict. The second is to provide a teaching resource which can be used to give students an accessible introduction to ...