Following Franco

Download or read book Following Franco written by Duncan Wheeler and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transition to democracy that followed the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 was once hailed as a model of political transformation. But since the 2008 financial crisis it has come under intense scrutiny. Today, a growing divide exists between advocates of the Transition and those who see it as the source of Spain’s current socio-political bankruptcy. This book revisits the crucial period from 1962 to 1992, exposing the networks of art, media and power that drove the Transition and continue to underpin Spanish politics in the present. Drawing on rare archival materials and over three hundred interviews with politicians, artists, journalists and ordinary Spaniards, including former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez (1982–96), Following Franco unlocks the complex and often contradictory narratives surrounding the foundation of contemporary Spain.

Download or read book Exhuming Franco written by Sebastiaan Faber and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism. This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.

Download or read book Franco and Hitler written by Stanley G. Payne and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why didn't Spain enter World War II? In what ways did Spain collaborate with the Third Reich? How much did Spain assist Jewish refugees? This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco’s relationship with Hitler, from 1936 to the fall of the Reich in 1945. But as Payne brilliantly shows, relations between these two dictators were not only a matter of realpolitik. These two titanic egos engaged in an extraordinary tragicomic drama often verging on the dark absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play. Whereas Payne investigates the evolving relationship of the two regimes up to the conclusion of World War II, his principal concern is the enigma of Spain’s unique position during the war, as a semi-fascist country struggling to maintain a tortured neutrality. Why Spain did not enter the war as a German ally, joining with Hitler to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British navy, is at the center of Payne’s narrative. Franco’s only personal meeting with Hitler, in 1940 to discuss precisely this, is recounted here in groundbreaking detail that also sheds significant new light on the Spanish government’s vacillating policy toward Jewish refugees, on the Holocaust, and on Spain’s German connection throughout the duration of the war.

Download or read book Fire in the Placa written by Dorothy Noyes and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Fire in the Plaça is the first full-length study in English of the Patum, a Corpus Christi fire festival unique to Berga, Catalonia, Spain, celebrated annually since the seventeenth century. Participants in the festival are transformed through drink, sleep deprivation, crowding, constant motion, and the smoke and sparks of close-range firecrackers into passionate members of a precarious body politic. Combining richly layered symbolism with intense bodily expression, the Patum has long served as a grassroots equivalent of grand social theory; it moves from a representation of social divisions to a forcible communion among them. The Patum's dancing effigies—giants, dwarves, Turks and Christian knights, devils and angels, a crowned eagle, and two flaming mule-dragons—have provided local allegories for a long series of political conflicts, but the festival obscures its own messages in smoke and motion to enable a temporary merging of opposites. Activists in the 1970s transition to democracy in Spain took the Patum as a model of how old adversaries might collaborate: it helped to shape the mix of assertiveness in performance and compromise in practice that is typical of contemporary Catalan nationalism. The Patum became a focus of resistance to the Franco regime and drew visitors from all over Catalonia, serving as a rehearsal for the mass protests in Barcelona. Later, it provided the newly autonomous region with a vehicle for integrating immigrants and a vocabulary of belonging, culminating in the Patum-derived devils of the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic games. Today, as mines and factories have closed in Berga, the Patum serves as an arena in which provincial Catalans model their relationship to Barcelona, Europe, and the world, and reflects their ambivalence about the choices open to them. Seeking a third way between tourism and terrorism, provincial towns like Berga show us the future of all local communities under globalization. In collective performances such as the Patum, tensions between cultural and political representation are made visible, and the gap between aspiration and possibility is both bridged and acknowledged. In this exceptionally rich ethnographic study, Dorothy Noyes explores the predicament of provincial communities striving to overcome internal conflict and participate in a wider world.

Download or read book Franco written by Gabrielle Ashford Hodges and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General Francisco Franco came to prominence during the days of David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson and was able to cling to absolute political power until his death in 1975. Over his fifty-year career, he became one of the four dictators who changed the face of Europe during the twentieth century. Franco joined the Spanish Army when he was barely fifteen years old. In 1926 he became the youngest general in Europe and, driven by an astonishing sense of his own greatness, was recognized as sole military commander of the Nationalist zone during the Spanish Civil War. His ambition was always to hold on to the power that he had secured. In practice, this meant winning the Spanish Civil War and surviving the fall of the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini and the international isolation that followed their defeat. But behind the military heroics and dexterous political footwork lay an insecure and vengeful man, wracked by contradictory impulses. Although fueled by a single-minded determination to succeed, he was full of self-doubt. A bold and sometimes inspirational soldier in Africa, he became an indecisive, hesitant military commander during the Civil War. Filled with a burning conviction that his destiny was bound up with the medieval kings of Spain and God Himself, he appeared shy, withdrawn, and humble. Ruthlessly intent on wiping out all political opposition, he denied heatedly that he was a dictator. A stubborn man, he could be remarkably flexible when it came to safeguarding his power. Gabrielle Ashford Hodges' psychological biography considers Franco's mental state, as well as his political motivation. In doing so, it succeeds admirably in getting under the skin of Europe's most enduring dictator.

Download or read book The Transformation of Spain written by David Gilmour and published by London ; New York : Quartet Books. This book was released on 1985 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Franco written by Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General Francisco Franco, also called the Caudillo, was the dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. His life has been examined in many previous biographies. However, most of these have been traditional, linear biographies that focus on Franco’s military and political careers, neglecting the significance of who exactly Franco was for the millions of Spaniards over whom he ruled for almost forty years. In this new biography Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez looks at Franco from a fresh perspective, emphasizing the cultural and social over the political. Cazorla-Sanchez's Franco uses previously unknown archival sources to analyse how the dictator was portrayed by the propaganda machine, how the opposition tried to undermine his prestige, and what kind of opinions, rumours and myths people formed of him, and how all these changed over time. The author argues that the collective construction of Franco’s image emerged from a context of material needs, the political traumas caused by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the complex cultural workings of a society in distress, political manipulation, and the lack of any meaningful public debate. Cazorla-Sanchez's Franco is a study of Franco’s life as experienced and understood by ordinary people; by those who loved or admired him, by those who hated or disliked him, and more generally, by those who had no option but to accommodate their existence to his rule. The book has a significance that goes well beyond Spain, as Cazorla-Sanchez explores the all-too-common experience of what it is like to live under the deep shadow cast by an always officially praised, ever present, and long lasting dictator.