Quotes from Helen Graham

It is no wonder that so many children preferred life on the streets, for street children forced into petty theft and prostitution were also a singular phenomenon of 1940s Spain

The military rebels and their civilian supporters were thus redefining "the enemy" as entire sectors of society that were perceived as "out of control

its own survival into the future depended on its ability to harness economic change in order, in the immediate term, to resolve the crisis of near state bankruptcy caused by its own economic policies (autarky),

It also meant "cleansing" people who symbolized cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, intellectuals, unionized and/or autodidact workers, "new" women.

the ultra laissez-faire industrialization pursued by the Franco regime,

Rebel violence was targeted against the socially, culturally and sexually different.

the regime's utter cultural and intellectual mediocrity, and especially its obsession with ensuring a rigid outward conformity to its neo-traditionalist values in public life.

This "cleansing" violence, or limpieza, claimed its most famous victim in the poet Federico García Lorca,

Catalyzed by an international economic crisis that crystallized with the oil crisis of 1973, in essence it was a crisis of the dictatorship's domestic political legitimacy.

to "have ideas" (tener ideas), thinking for oneself being considered doubly reprehensible in women.

late Francoism: the extravagant bureaucracy easily circumvented by insiders;

vigilantes. What occurred was a massacre of civilians by other civilians.

100,000 members of the Falange were still permitted to carry guns.

this was a "dirty war" and it "disappeared" some 30,000 people during the war of 1936–39.

After the death of Franco himself in November 1975 removed the crucial symbolic impediment, this process was impelled by reformist Francoists who understood that dismantling dictatorial structures dating back to the civil war and 1940s was the price of continued prosperity in new economic times.

described as a "reconquest", it effected a mass limpieza, laying waste to civilian sectors opposed to the coup – in particular the rural landless – thereby also reversing by force of arms the Republic's agrarian reform.

For fear was the great unspoken protagonist of the transition process in Spain. Fear most of all of another civil war:

African mercenaries (the regulares)

The transition of the 1970s in Spain was thus a feast of change, but also a civic famine, in that it left unresolved the huge weight of forty years of violent dictatorship, addressing none of the vast accumulated social hurt, the damage done.

the desire first to humiliate and then to eradicate those women who had demonstrated any kind of autonomy, but especially those who had actively participated in the military defence of the Republic (the milicianas).

like Stalin, Franco pursued an intransigent political idea of "purifying" state and domestic order with extreme levels of brutality and coercion.

requetés (the Carlist militia)

there are some striking similarities with the post-Soviet experience where a heterogeneously configured and relatively marginal civic memory movement also struggles against a state that neither properly recognizes, still less commemorates the unlawfully murdered.3

the story of how "Francoism" was built – bottom up as a repressive, carceral society – as well as top down as a political regime.