Interrogating Francoism Paperback – 25 Aug 2016

Review

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 Spains first democracy and the civil war that destroyed it. In the face of attempts, both in Spain and abroad, to sanitise Francos subsequent dictatorship, this volume highlights once again the regimes 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

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 193s 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 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 Francoisms 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

About the Author

Helen Graham is Professor of Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of The Spanish Republic at War (2003), The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005) and The War and its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century (2012).