When Was the War in Spain? Liberal State,Illiberal Justice in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The article analyzes increasingly militarized state power and public order in twentieth-century Spain, discussing these in the context of other European states’ disciplinary regimes, with their ubiquitous social-Darwinist dimension in an era of accelerating urbanization, industrial change and emergent mass societies. The article offers a dissection of the often problematically opaque term ‘liberal’, arguing that wherever Spain or other twentieth-century European states were positioned on the dictatorial-through-parliamentary-constitutional spectrum, they all came to be ‘gardening states’ (Bauman). Each state's goal was to sculpt its population as part of a nationalist project – nationalism being the norm, whether named as such or not. Francoism is analysed in this framework, as a hybrid war-born political order blending old-style, top-down military control with new forms of populist mass mobilization from below, the latter enabled and accelerated by the war of 1936–1939. The article defines the Franco dictatorship as fascist in the 1940s and totalitarian for far longer, until macro-economic changes – which its cupola believed for a long time need not affect the deep form of Spanish society – hollowed out Francoism's own ideological categories (and its ‘disciplinary’ efficacy), but not its obsession with social control, which it called ‘social peace’.

The basic requirement of an authentic, fully realized Empire is internal political homogeneity. ¹

In the Beginning: The Liberal Legacy and its Discontents

The coalition of social and political forces from which Francoism emerged coalesced in the 1930s to resist the ‘nightmare’ of mass participatory democracy that Spanish conservatives, both patrician and popular, saw represented in the Second Republic. All believed the identity markers of their crisis to be uniquely Spanish, and much fear-driven mythologizing ensued. ² In reality, however, the coordinates of the crisis which brought them together were common ones emerging across Europe from the end of the 1914–1918 war, as old hierarchies juddered or collapsed, and new constituencies arose and became delineated inside post-war societies, especially among returning soldiers and war workers, who sought to gain traction – to achieve economic benefit (often land) and political rights, in short, an effective voice. Spain had not of course been a belligerent power in 1914–1918, but the war nonetheless profoundly affected its polity and society in many qualitatively similar, i.e., structurally mobilizing ways. As Paco Romero expressed it in his study of Spain and the First World War, ‘Spain did not enter the war, but the war entered Spain.’ ³ It did so by delivering a massive jolt to the demand for its industrial products, which as a result saw large-scale worker migration to industrial centres, and especially to Barcelona, with the substantial expansion of its industrial suburbs and a concomitant growth of unionization and labour disputes. ⁴ But Barcelona was still Spain's only metropolis, and the relatively circumscribed, semi-contained nature of industrial and urban development elsewhere in the country, inside a ‘sea’ of agriculture, meant the central state's view from Madrid remained that of the powerfully entrenched agrarian oligarchy. It saw the new political demands of an emergent mass – and class – society not in terms of challenges to be met and bargained with strategically, but in terms of ‘old’ public order problems to be dealt with in the traditional manner, by the deployment of concerted – and disproportionate – military force, top down.

This process of militarized public order became thoroughly ingrained during Spain's monarchy (1874–1931), and especially through its serial impositions of ‘states of war’, in various legal incarnations, and/or the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Across all or part of Spain, there were up to a hundred occurrences of this over the monarchy's 56 years, which turned the military into the ultimate arbiter of public order and, in turn, fixed in it the habit of, and the will to, rule. ⁵ The deep reasons for this went back to the very process of central liberal state formation in Spain, through successive wars across the nineteenth century, and the central state's subsequent reliance on military personnel. ⁶ This said, the deployment of military force to repel bids to extend political rights down the social pyramid was hardly unique to Spain – consider the manner of the Paris Commune's destruction in 1871 at the hands of a French army defeated in an external war against Prussia, and then turned on an internal movement which represented egalitarian reform in the metropolis. Moreover, in the context of an early twentieth-century urbanizing and industrializing Europe, all economically ‘liberal’ states were everywhere far less liberal, i.e., laissez-faire, when it came to matters of public order and punishment. ⁷ They sought to sculpt and shape their populations and to develop tighter social disciplining and control over the mass of workers and ‘underclasses’ in the expanding cities: out of these fears and desires would be honed and developed the discourse and practices of social Darwinism, which were also themselves explicitly understood as strategies of war. ⁸

But notable in Spain's case was the sheer longevity of the army's protagonism and its overshadowing of civil state authorities in matters of public order. The military hung on tenaciously, and from the 1880s into the twentieth century they gradually extended their sphere of responsibility in public order roles. As the empire shrank back, so the military looked towards making a compensatory sphere for itself inside Spain, for reasons that were clearly material as well as ideological. ⁹ The key means by which this happened was through a raft of army legislation which arrogated to the military courts all crimes against state security, the crown, and the church, which was thus already positioned underneath the state umbrella (see Gómez Bravo in this special issue). ¹⁰ Crimes against state security included symbolic ones (insults ¹¹ ), and ‘security’ was very rapidly understood as meaning the internal political life of Spain, too, in other words modes of disciplining the civilian population. ¹² The structural violence generated by this increasingly militarized society can be glimpsed in turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century accounts – one observer, for example, noted the effects of the ‘ceremonial eruption’ of the state into worker neighbourhoods in parades where military and ecclesiastical symbolism and personnel melded indistinguishably. Such sights were described as producing ‘an unhealthy atmosphere, like a mixture of sadness and panic’, as did the sight of public executions, or of prisoners in a lamentable state being herded on foot through the streets of poor areas – a scene that came to be replicated in the 1940s. ¹³ The ‘special jurisdictions’ for the military, which Franco would later make extensive use of, were already undermining the unity of the constitutional legal system in early twentieth-century Spain, and thus its safeness: the more special sections appeared, the nearer the country came to autocracy/dictatorship. But they were waved through by a monarch who himself favoured a militarized view of the world.

The military continued building up its control relatively unchallenged by either conventional police forces or paramilitary formations. This in turn bespoke the relative slowness or, more precisely, the uneven development of a variegated class structure in Spain, and especially the late and patchy appearance of urban middling classes. Their rise elsewhere tended to stimulate the development of civilian policing, which increased the state's political legitimacy in the eyes of these emerging constituencies. But Spain's police would continue to exist very much in the military's shadow – rudimentary, under-professionalized and generally underdeveloped and under-resourced, in direct proportion to the similar condition of its urban middling classes, which along with industry, remained a phenomenon of the geographical periphery into the 1920s. In Spain's central agrarian ‘sea’, its market-town inhabitants of the ‘middling’ sort – those who serviced the estates surrounding them (lawyers, notaries, shopkeepers, pharmacists, estate/farm stewards and managers), Spain's equivalent of the central European gentry class – still felt themselves to be more or less safe and secure in an old world of fixed hierarchies to which they felt bound by ties of custom, social respect and deference. They had still not yet directly experienced the fearful wake of mobilizing change which elsewhere in the 1920s often took their equivalents into counterrevolutionary paramilitary formations.

But already by 1918 signs of change were evident elsewhere in Spain. In Barcelona's industrial ambit the army general, who was also military governor, made an informal ‘defence pact’ with local factory owners. The object was to discipline unruly labour and push back strike action, which had mushroomed in the wake of the power shift caused by accelerated production to meet escalating export targets from Europe's belligerent powers. By 1920, this military governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, had assumed civil governor powers: in this capacity he unleashed a dirty war of systematized intimidation, torture and the rolling-out on an industrial scale of Spain's time-honoured form of extrajudicial assassination, the ley de fugas (prisoners were shot in the back while allegedly ‘escaping’). This period also saw the birth in Barcelona of Spain's first modern paramilitary organization, the Free Unions (Sindicatos Libres) whose members received training and support inside the barracks. ¹⁴ They engaged in a spiral of reciprocal, violent street action with labour activists of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in what, between 1919 and the early 1920s, was an intra-societal war, or, as the military saw it, a ‘campaign’. In the midst of the bombs and assassinations, Martínez Anido, speaking as the civil governor, threatened that for every Sindicato Libre gunman killed they would kill three of the CNT's. The maintenance of a military fief, or near-monopoly in public order, and the continued application of military solutions to quell political unrest and block political reform movements in the face of the growing popular mobilization of the post-1917 period, gave a particular hallmark to ‘the war in Spain’ and to the forms of illiberal justice deployed to fight it. The cost of the ensuing escalation – in itself an indication that the system was not working – was the imposition of a formal military dictatorship in Spain in 1923, with the monarch's blessing. Probably inevitably, given its traditional power base of crown, landowners and church, the dictatorship did little to address the need to modernize a post-imperial Spain's fiscal and political structures, required to ensure that the country could pay its way in new times. Rather the dictatorship further extended the military's special jurisdictions and ingrained the idea that ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ in Spain could only mean a militarized – and paramilitarized – core, ¹⁵ all the while encouraging nostalgic colonial adventures in Spain's North African colonies, as inconclusive as they were wasteful. These could never ‘replace’ the empire, but they did mortgage the future. It was a modern inflection of imperial Spain's centuries-old dilemma – to fund external war or reform the metropolis.

On the face of things, the future was still opening up, as the 1920s European boom fuelled further urbanizing change in Spain. Many other cities expanded, including Madrid, ¹⁶ and there was a notable catch-up urbanization of town centres on Spain's eastern seaboard, down through Valencia and Alicante to Almería in the south east. All of this acted as midwife to the new democratic Republic, born in 1931 out of the wreckage of a delegitimized military dictatorship which had continued to stifle the social and political aspirations of the emerging middling classes on this burgeoning urban periphery. But no sooner was the new Republic in existence than it came hard up against the overweening corporate desires of the powerful military establishment. Not that the liberal Republican political elite was not also greatly exercised by the need to guarantee public order and discipline mass society: it was, and social Darwinist discourses of ‘social defence’ were perfectly present among leading republicans in power. Indeed, the law which made preventive detention legal for the first time in Spain, and which the Franco dictatorship would use so extensively (see Richards and Graham/Lorenzo Rubio in this special issue), was designed and promulgated by the liberal republicans in summer 1933. ¹⁷ However, they were also committed to demilitarizing public order, indeed civilianizing the state lay at the core of republican reforms. So, the Republic pushed back against the ‘creep’ of special jurisdictions and abolished the most powerful and infamous of them, ¹⁸ just as it also, to a certain extent, concomitantly developed civilian policing.

Military hostility at this attempt on its corporate power also came with a powerful ideological sting – for the unassuaged imperial dreams were now projected inward onto the metropolis, in search of a war to fight against internal enemies which could also expunge the memory of earlier, massive colonial defeat. ¹⁹ Soon this angry political imaginary coalesced with an equally strong and fearful civilian one. This imaginary emanated from elite and non-elite conservatives who were hostile to the modest measure of social and economic levelling proposed by the new Republic. Once the civilian right had failed to block structural reform by legal, parliamentary means, the coordinates were set for the military to intervene to stop the clock. ²⁰

The officers who made the coup of July 1936 likely expected to be able to deliver a standard, time-honoured military repertoire of ‘restraint’, even if this would potentially incorporate a larger-scale use of exemplary, lethal violence against resisters. This was military action designed to ‘court martial’ the very possibility of social change and drive Spanish society back into its traditional hierarchical mould, something which would also assure the endangered corporate prerogatives and the ideological interests of conservative army officers. But even the conspirators understood that this ‘reverse’ could only go so far: the bulletin they issued to justify the coup implies they already understood that this was now a battle to win popular legitimacy – or at least to affirm it discursively – even if not, of course, to champion popular sovereignty. ²¹ So it was back to the mid-nineteenth century, rather than the eighteenth. But the military insurgents expected resisters to look like the striking workers of 1917 in Barcelona. They were therefore surprised by the far greater scale and social variegation of resistance to the coup. (Indeed, even today we still tend to see this resistance signalled as exclusively worker – in the iconography of street fighting, or indeed discursively in a later, highly freighted propagandizing around ‘anticommunism’, whether Francoist or Cold War-originated more generally.) But the resistance in Spain's cities and towns was a sociologically mixed one, in part the result of the speeding up of urbanization in the 1920s, but also of the general politicization of the middling classes therein, who were increasingly angered at being excluded by the crown-sanctioned military dictatorship of 1923–1930, and among whom a specific social and cultural identity also arose, not least through their constitution as a radio-listening group. These middling classes too would be wartime resisters, protagonists, victims and perpetrators. ²² Emblematic of this social change and of the concomitant professionalization, was the participation of members of Spain's late-developing civilian police forces in the anti-coup resistance – in fact everywhere that the Republic did prevail in urban Spain (which was most places) it had portions of police forces with it, although relatively less support within the militarized civil guard. ²³

So, although the insurgents were not expecting to trigger a war, they did so, because Spain in 1936 was already a different society to the one they perceived it to be. Topographically and sociologically, we can point to some parallels with the cashiering of a socially reforming democracy in Austria in February 1934. ²⁴ But the ‘urban Spain’ of 1936 was bigger, more variegated, and much more spread out. By 1937, the conflict had escalated to become a total war, mobilizing civilian as well as military fronts – indeed mobilizing in one way or another virtually the entirety of Spain's population. This escalation was also importantly a consequence of external factors, namely the expansionist foreign policies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. But the effects inside Spain were revolutionary in domestic terms, including (though this is less commonly understood) inside the insurgent/Francoist zone. It was the process of the war itself, which, like a tidal wave, drowned all trace and possibility of the coup makers’ original objective of a military coup that would achieve total social demobilization. It did so most visibly through the military conscription process which total war came to dictate in both the Republican and Francoist zones – although in Franco's Spain there was no need for any mobilization of industrial war workers, given the plentiful, guaranteed and integrated military hardware that came from Hitler and Mussolini. But a more searing, lasting and toxic mobilization came through all forms of the subterranean dirty war behind the lines. In the Francoist zone, civilian-on-civilian violence always occurred under the permissive watch of the military, and shored up their own power. But it also created new grassroots allegiances the military authorities could then deploy, through the very fact of perpetration – as civilians mobilized in paramilitary death squads annihilated those other bodies that disturbed the established order of things. Thus the rage and fear of mobilized populist conservatism is something that also fuelled the new Francoist order in the making.

The Francoist authorities soon began harnessing this energy, channelling it in various forms into official ‘virtue’ – the mobilized mass commemoration of the ‘martyred’ dead and other forms of public grief-building that the Franco authorities rapidly attached to the ‘sacred’ memory of those killed by ‘the other side’, and which, in turn, consolidated and legitimized the new Francoist order, emerging now both as radicalized popular movement and proto-state (termed the estado campamental ²⁵ ). Many in Spain's gentry class had in 1936 taken up arms as volunteers to defend an older world of service and tradition. But their wartime political and physical encadrement saw them transformed by their experience, and melded with other cohorts – the foot soldiers of Francoism, drawn from the conservative, inland smallholding peasantry of Old Castile, the middling classes of its old market towns (whence the Falange also drew heavily), the army's new non-commissioned officers (alféreces provisionales), a mass of veterans (including ex-prisoners of the Republicans and/or relatives of the ‘martyred dead’ – i.e., those killed in the war against the Republic, and especially if those deaths were extrajudicial ones, and part of the dirty war behind the lines). ²⁶ All these mobilized groups played a pivotal role from 1939 in sustaining the Francoist edifice-under-construction, just as the alféreces provisionales would also provide core new staff to run the prisons. ²⁷

Through the war(s), both battlefield and other, mass mobilization remade Francoism as something new and modern. War was, then, the crucible that transformed the insurgency to produce Francoism tout court as Spanish fascism – i.e. this was not only about the self-declared fascist Falange. Nor does the key role of the Catholic Church gainsay this definition of Francoism per se as fascist. ²⁸ As has been observed, the peasant ‘foot soldiers’ went into the war to defend their Catholic religion but came out of it defending an ultranationalist Catholic state. ²⁹ The militarized state had, moreover, long owned the church – that much is clear from the turn-of-the-century monarchist legislation discussed earlier. (Since the 1880s, the military courts adjudging crimes against state security had included in their ambit the ecclesiastical authorities – see footnote 10 above.) So Francoist state-building would do no more than use appropriate local pre-existing structures – including those of the most fundamentalist Catholic Church in Europe – as the means of defining, channelling and accelerating its mobilized, populist ultranationalism which ‘worshipped’ hierarchy and homogeneity. Both of these values were epitomized by ‘true empire’, as encapsulated in the words of the Catalan modernist writer and Francoist intellectual, Eugenio d’Ors, which appear in this article's epigraph. After all, the Cardinal Primate of Spain, Gomá y Tomás, had himself spoken longingly in the 1930s of forms of ‘divine totalitarianism’ (see Gómez Bravo, in this special issue).

The chronology of this war to construct a fascist state overflowed the conventional one of the battlefield war of 1936–1939, and continued across the 1940s, during which time Francoism emerged as a hybrid phenomenon. It never ceased using the overarching militarized state frame: mass military trials of the defeated; militarized justice and the proliferation of special jurisdictions therein; ³⁰ the war against the guerrilla; an actually declared state of war until 1948, followed by numerous further declarations of states of war until virtually the end of the dictatorship; and a prison system that imposed militarized discipline and routines on inmates right up until the end of the 1970s, and which was run by secret military decree, whatever the cosmetic discourse presented textually from the mid-1950s to the UN and other international interlocutors. But none of this conforms to old-fashioned authoritarianism, i.e. political demobilization of the population, after the fashion of, say, Horthy's Hungary after the First World War. For inhabiting Franco's militarized framework was a war-born mass movement which would drive forward the building of the new state, on the foundations of mass repression of the defeated. The Franco state exhorted its faithful to denounce the ‘internal enemy’ – often neighbours, acquaintances, sometimes family members – to which the ‘faithful’ responded, for reasons which blended revenge, hatred, fear, lucre: only sometimes was there a conscious ultra-nationalist commitment, though certainly there was always a canny understanding of how the new political climate could be profited from. ³¹ Among the denouncers, war veterans merged with mobilized civilians – sometimes, but not always, from the new massified Falange, which the war, or rather the army, had made. Their role as denouncers in this state- and nation-building was to trigger investigations by the military courts, which, in effect, produced the mass trials of the defeated. They also ‘bore witness’ to the state committees charged with purging public life and the professions of ‘enemies’, or delivered testimony to the tribunals of political responsibilities (which imposed economic sanctions on the defeated – property expropriation, fines, etc.); or made representation to the Causa General, the state law suit against the Republic that became the influential showcase and disseminator of Francoist propaganda. All of this mass action involved modern psychological conscription, yet was simultaneously framed by an older repertoire of top-down military power which would continue to employ militarized techniques of public order/social control that had been honed across decades in Spain. So the assemblage of mechanisms and machinery that fused as Francoism was always a powerful blend. It is therefore something of a conundrum that so many Anglo-American commentators, historians included, still see the Francoist dictatorship as only one part of that ‘blend’ – i.e., resurgent antiquatedness, when the cumulative evidence clearly indicates that Francoism was something new: the enduring and extensive application of militarized discipline to a highly mobilized and rapidly modernizing society.

What had started back in July 1936 as an attempt by conservative military to block social change had thus failed on its own first premise – notwithstanding the fact that Franco won a military victory. Now Francoism was to become a totalizing project to remake state and society by means of coercion, practised not only against those it excluded (the ‘enemy’, the ‘anti-nation’) but also as a form of discipline to encourage ‘community insiders’ to conform. The model worked exactly as it had done in Nazi Germany (right down to the workings of the ‘really existing Volksgemeinschaft’ ³² ) or in the Soviet Union, against both the excluded and included: and here ‘war’ is not only actual war, but also conceived as Franco state-impelled or -fostered forms of economic development involving mass structural violence against the population, as would be the case in Stalinism too. ³³ Few among Spain's ordinary population could choose to stand entirely aside (although in many cases the ethical choice not to denounce remained, and refraining from doing so did not usually put the potential denouncer in mortal danger. ³⁴ Another matter entirely, however, was the all-pervasive fear that saturated life for many ordinary Spaniards, especially in the 1940s ³⁵ ). One way or another, the entire population was to be mobilized: Francoism was only some twenty years on from the white terror of Horthy's – much more rural – Hungary, but it seemed more like two hundred years in terms of the transformative effects of mass mobilization. By 1940 the ‘old conservative’ or ‘traditionalist’ preference within the Francoist coalition stood defeated by the first principle of the French revolution. But that was little consolation to those being constructed by the new Franco state as ‘anti-nation’. The state's major focus in the 1940s on political prisoners (i.e., their incarceration en masse in gaols and labour camps ³⁶ ) was because they constituted an alternative, indeed for Francoism a competing way of seeing and organizing Spain's polity and society. And the ‘enemy’ here was not only workers, but also protean forms of middling class constituencies across Spain, mostly but not always urban, who had also ‘seen’ the world differently by 1936.

All were delegitimized at a stroke in Francoist pronouncements by the description of them as ‘degenerate communists’, a screen discourse that was to be much facilitated from the end of the 1940s by the ascendant Cold War in Europe and globally. But the use of the adjectival qualification ‘degenerate’ indicates how the Franco state was blurring the categories between political enemies more specifically defined, and other social threats which a mass urbanizing society (and the poor tout court, whether urban or rural) were inherently seen as posing to its preferred order of stable, traditional and self-perpetuating hierarchical society – what in Francoist ideology would always be termed ‘social peace’. Here Franco's enemies turn out to be of qualitatively similar category to those ‘identified’ by other gardening and sculpting states across twentieth-century Europe: ‘reds’ (or ‘whites’, depending on the case), ‘ethnic others’, social ‘degenerates’, ‘wayward’ women, ‘homosexuals’, ‘delinquent youth’, the ‘workshy’, ‘inveterate criminals’ – and by ‘identified’ we of course mean manufactured. Thus, in its discourse and policies, Francoism positions itself on a continuum of liberal sculpting states – a definition which can perfectly well include totalitarian states, whether fascist or otherwise. ³⁷ Such states, wherever located on the dictatorial-through-constitutional/parliamentary continuum, wanted to control how their populations lived and to do this they used a variety of techniques, including coercive, or at the very least ‘sculpting’, welfare. In sum, no subject or citizen could live any longer against, or outside, the state.

But unlike Stalin's state, Franco's was unable to maintain an autarkic (i.e. economically self-sufficient) course. Spain lacked the internal resources to pursue a model of primary industrialization under its own strength, as the Soviet Union had done. Rurality without an empire to back it economically was equally an impossibility, for all the discursive dreaming of 1940s Francoism. By the 1950s, economic force majeure obliged Francoism to accept the consumerist industrializing model for Spain's future, buoyed by necessary foreign investment and, closely linked to that, a clientelist relationship with the US. Certainly a post-imperial Spain had no viable way forward other than through industrialization, otherwise state bankruptcy and Francoism's own collapse would have loomed. ³⁸ The form of industrialization the regime undertook posed all sorts of ‘moral dangers’ to Francoism's dream of an ultra-hierarchical and closely surveilled society. But it also produced the means to satisfy, pacify, divert or enslave a variety of potentially troublesome old and new social constituencies and, what is more, keep them perpetually on the outside of the Francoist polity – along with the middle classes of peripheral nationalism, the remnants of older urban middling classes elsewhere, and, of course, all those of whatever social constituency who had, or would, serve time as political prisoners of the dictatorship.

‘Developmentalist’ Francoism

In terms of ‘pacification’, the ‘economic miracle’ accelerating across the 1960s would create a new, middle-managerial and predominantly Castilian-born support class for Francoism: ³⁹ they were the white-collar urbans and suburbans, satisfied with the benefits of relative affluence and consumerist domesticity. These novelties widened the old Francoist coalition to absorb these new groups, thereby reducing the destabilizing effects of the mass rural-to-urban migration necessary to deliver the industrial workforce. But, in any case, state social control was facilitated by its disorienting effects, and the ensuing further social dislocation and fragmentation occasioned by inward-migration itself. This soon also came to uproot the impoverished peasantry of the Castilian heartlands/north-west, once Franco's foot soldiers. Life was harsh for all the inward migrants: it became a form of enslavement, the ‘war for survival’ prefigured in social Darwinist ideology, and an all-consuming reality, notwithstanding the rhythms of migration which to some extent allowed old social and geographical support networks to be reproduced inside the shanties and slums of the urban industrial peripheries. ⁴⁰

Francoism's rapidly emerging neoliberal model of the 1960s, with low state expenditure and a correspondingly scant supply of public goods – whether education, health care, or publicly-funded social housing – made this struggle for survival inevitable. The fall-out for those migrants and other poorer urban workers who either could not make it, or who would not conform to the few permitted Francoist models of behaviour (old-style austerity or new-style private domesticity) had to be managed in various ways. But all of them can be subsumed under the heading of ‘spatial containment’, whether inside or outside of prison.

High levels of police surveillance were key to ‘outside’ forms of control, and especially to the business of policing the underside of the economic miracle. By 1970, Spain had one police officer per 320 inhabitants. ⁴¹ Urban policing was ubiquitous, but the dictatorship inevitably had more interest in controlling areas where potentially disruptive constituencies congregated, and thus where migrants and other groups of the poor lived and worked. Popular neighbourhoods inside big city centres were closely surveilled: for example, El Perchel in Málaga, or the Raval in Barcelona, indicating that the state's gaze ‘mapped’ those spaces with ‘unruly’ pasts. Also closely supervised were ‘suspicious subjects’ found beyond these, in well-to-do quarters of cities, when neither work nor any other ‘credible’ motive (or credible to the detaining police) could be adduced to justify their presence. Such ‘subjects’ often found themselves swallowed by the system of preventive detention, a process which could easily lead to a period of prison detention, even though the detained person had not broken any law nor committed a crime (see Graham/Lorenzo Rubio in this issue). Police presence in the burgeoning peripheries of worker dormitory blocs and/or shanty towns (chabolas) was rather more sparse – the safety valve there being their apartness. Spatial segregation was partly an effect of the economic model, but of course it was also highly desirable to Francoism's model of ‘social peace’: in other words, here was a social apartheid to match Francoism's political variety. ⁴²

Another key form of social disciplining on the urban frontier came via the extensive infrastructure and activities of the Catholic Church. Long established Catholic associationalist networks ran a range of pastoral and welfare centres to minister to the material needs of migrants and other poor constituencies, but also to seek control through new evangelization programmes. Into these worlds of the city poor and new industrial suburbs came the ‘good women’ of the Francoist upper middle classes, as if missionaries into the colonies. ⁴³ Evangelization attempts were not in themselves likely to be successful, but more subtle forms of dependency and acceptance were achieved: for example, via the (popular) sports facilities provided for children and adolescents, or the vital material aid regularly dispensed through food and clothes donations.

By the late 1960s, the challenge for Francoism was how to contain the social and cultural fall-out of necessary economic change in order to protect its never-relinquished ideal of ‘social peace’. The authorities were in every regard primarily focused now on the challenges of mass rather than class society. First via the close supervision of those who fell off the work round or who could not, for other reasons, including physical or mental health, survive in the brave new urban world, and who were often managed via ‘preventive detention’, with or without custodial sentences. Second, there was regime management of broader sectors of society via the still-stringent censorship in place around all forms of media and cultural production intended for mass consumption. ⁴⁴ The Franco state still, of course, operated its ‘archaic’ mechanics of repression against the politically-encadred anti-Franco resistance, by means of serially-declared states of war/emergency, ⁴⁵ occupation of university campuses, torture (endemic in police stations) and the military court system for anything deemed an offence against ‘state security’ (which was always extraordinarily widely defined). Over military justice there always hung the terror-inducing ‘mystique’ of capital punishment. From 1964, the Franco state also deployed the quasi-civilian Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP) – only quasi, because TOP too was a special jurisdiction, set apart from a unitary code of law. But consider this: that the use of the TOP extended far beyond encadred anti-Franco activists or protesting students, to inscribe the political in wider and wider ways – in short, to castigate ‘outbreaks of civil society’, and instrumentally to rekindle the insidious, widespread forms of latent social fear that had served the dictatorship so well since the beginning. ⁴⁶ In this reading, Francoism is then another name for the attempt to bury in perpetuity the possibility of a civil society, of any society beyond raison d’état, and to guarantee an order where the state is always incarnated in military values and society always subsumed in a militarized order.

As these more diffuse forms of urban social control expanded (they were still militarized of course, but, in the TOP, fines were also often increasingly present as a form of punishment), then the function of prison itself, i.e., of custodial sentences, continued to mutate. Long gone was the mass population of political prisoners of the 1940s. Francoism still had political prisoners, of course, of both old and new types, the latter also augmented by the rise of novel forms of trade union activism among new generations of urban/industrial workers. But now there were hundreds of political detainees, not tens and tens of thousands. The bulk of the prison population now was the ballast of the ‘economic miracle’, the many thousands swept in as common prisoners through the hurricane of brutal development undertaken in extreme neoliberal mode. Here the nature of ‘common crime’ had once again been reconfigured, as it had been previously in the 1940s, through autarky and the black market. Franco's prison authorities still sought to ensure minimal contact between political and other cohorts of prisoner, although politicals and presos comunes were usually already separated by a gulf of experience – even before computing Francoist prison strategies for maintaining psychological divisions, given that it was in practice unfeasible to have total physical separation between the two groups (see Graham/Lorenzo Rubio in this special issue). ⁴⁷ The persistence of such strategies of separation are a reminder of Francoism's immanent fear that the alternative knowledge from (and of) the 1930s, both politically and culturally speaking, might somehow be transmitted from imprisoned political activists to other incarcerated groups. After all, Francoism had fought wars – both on the battlefield and institutionally thereafter – to annihilate that ‘knowledge’ forever, in all its forms. But this imperative in Francoism was nevertheless fainter and fainter. By the end of the 1960s, the Franco state's will to sculpt its population was much attenuated, but not so its will to control them – whether inside or outside institutions of confinement. The changes here had to do with the ascendancy of neoliberal economic modes in Francoism, and perhaps too indicate an implicit recognition of the intractable nature of the ‘anthropological revolution’ its own economic policies had conjured.

Certainly by the end of the 1970s, and Spain's transition out of dictatorship, the idea of prison had ceased to signify any kind of ‘front line’ in the Francoist political imaginary. ⁴⁸ Of that there is evidence aplenty in the manner in which Francoism's reformist wing negotiated both the political amnesty of 1977 and a pragmatic prison reform law in 1979 (see Lorenzo Rubio in this special issue). ⁴⁹ For the rest, the governance of Spain's urban, industrial mass society now happened by other relatively more sophisticated means, while the ‘alternatives’ once represented by the political detainees of the 1940s had been annihilated – or so at least Francoists believed. By the last years of the dictatorship, prisons were already neoliberal in their functioning as a ‘warehouse’ for ‘ballast’ – that human material surplus to economic requirements – rather than as a machine for producing Francoist subjects, or at least outwardly-conforming ones. But nor were the prisons privatized. They continued to be run on a shoestring, but were still seen as a state prerogative in what was late Francoism's hybrid mix of economic neoliberalism and old-style state interventionism/population control, the latter in the manner of the classic liberal states of the European twentieth century.