Reviews of Books
1222
the Carlist political organization centered in Navarre.
All other political formations in Spain were prohibited. The new organization thereby effectively became
"Franco's Falange," and the dictator, "Spain's savior,"
was declared the party's Jefe Nacional. The party grew
rapidly during the civil war, partly of course as a
function of this unification, but at the same time it lost
many prewar affiliates at the front. It has been estimated that there were some 36,000 members in July
1936, rising to 240,000 in 1937 and 650,000 by 1939.
There was a concomitant dilution of radicalism, and
Franco was installed not through the action of the
party, but through his military triumph (albeit one
achieved with the assistance of Adolf Hitler and
Benito Mussolini). The fascist party, despite its early
stated objective of emulating the Duce's success in
Italy, never came very close to conquering the Spanish
state. Rather, during the civil war, Franco's nascent
state, supported by the army, economie elites, the
church, civil servants, and lawyers, managed to conquer the Falange. Throughout the Franco years, the
Falangist "revolution" always remained pendiente
(awaited or pending).
In essence, the new party, FET y de las JONS,
represented a marriage of statist "historie fascism,"
originating in rural Castile in the early 1930s, with
Catholic Carlist traditionalism. The latter had incubated as a political force and as a somewhat hermetic
culture for decades prior to the brusque reforms of the
Second Republic to which it so profoundly reacted. A
major part of the story of the internal conflict of the
state party revolves around Falange-Carlist tensions
that Franco was able to exploit. This ongoing conflictual situation, and the complex mechanisms of conflict
resolution, are described, possibly in greater detail
than ever before, in the four substantive chapters of
the book.
The second part of Thomás's argument (outlined in
chapter one) supports the application of the notion of
"fascistization" to the Francoist state. This key concept
has been used to interpret the positioning of the party
within the new configuration of political power. Francoism was not installed as the result of the hegemony
of a fascist mass party. However, in effect, the Falange
from 1936 and again as the state party from 1937,
contributed to the "fascistization" (the use of fascist
symbols, for example) of much of the rest of the
coalition of power. Thomas explores such themes as
political repression, the justice system, women, youth
and student organizations, intellectual life, and the
press in relation to the influence of the party. The last
was relatively superficial, and the zenith of fascist
influence was reached as early as the second half of
1941. The conclusion is that Francoism in the period
1937-1945 was much more than an authoritarian regime, although much less than totalitarianism (p. 33).
The main problem with this book is the one that
affects historical study of the Franco years in general:
the old functionalist accounts may only be replaced
with descriptive accounts (formerly a weakness of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
some of the taxonomic obsessives). Meaningful comparisons rest only partly on description. Analysis of the
intersection of state and society (possibly through a
cultural approach to the reception and representation
of doctrine and policy) seems to offer the greatest
insights. This approach need not be determinist or
merely descriptive.
MICHAEL RICHARDS
University of the West of England
PALOMA AGUILAR. Memory and Amnesia: The Role of
the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy.
Translated by MARK OAKLEY. New York: Berghahn
Books. 2002. Pp. xxii, 330. Cloth $79.95, paper $29.95.
For scholars, studying memory and amnesia is an
abstract but rewarding intellectual exercise. For others, like contemporary Spaniards, memory has greater,
more personal meanings. Witness, for example, the
"Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory"
recently created to locate and exhume the mass graves
of those killed by Francisco Franco's Nationalists
during the Spanish Civil War. It has taken over
twenty-five years since the death of Franco for Spaniards to confront the ghosts of that war, and many have
done so with trepidation.
It is the relationship between the painful memories
of the Spanish Civil War and its effects on the Spanish
transition to democracy (1975-1982) that Paloma
Aguilar tackles in her book. Using sources of official
culture such as newsreels, monuments, textbooks, and
newspapers, Aguilar contends that the Franco regime
created and transmitted a collective historical memory
of the Civil War that provided a cautionary tale for
those who facilitated the transition. In other words, the
many political groups who fashioned the transition—
most of whom, she argues, were bomn during or right
after the war—worked to achieve consensus and reconciliation so that a civil war would never happen
again. Aguilar convincingly argues that the players in
the transition consciously drew lessons from their
perceptions of the past. Her work provides a novel way
to study "authoritarian régimes and processes of political transition" (p. 3odi).
The first chapter discusses memory studies and their
implications for the Spanish transition. I find this
chapter most problematic, mainly because I have
ceased to believe that one can use memory as a
category of historical and political analysis. To be fair,
Aguilar carefully shows the complexities of studying
memory, and she is aware of how difficult it is for
scholars to discuss and quantify individual and collective memories. But then she tries to quantify memory
in the next chapter by timing the number of minutes
that newsreels explicitly or implicitly mentioned events
related to the Civil War. In 1964, Spanish viewers saw
the most minutes (sixty-seven). Can one hour of
propaganda sprinkled throughout a year's worth of
movies really transmit a collective historical memory?
How can we actually know how people interpret what
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
they see on a movie screen? The narrative would have
worked better if, instead of memory, Aguilar had used
a concept like narrative representations.
As a study of the success of Francoist propaganda,
this work is stellar. Chapter two traces the evolution of
Francoist construction of historical narratives about
the Spanish Republic and the Civil War. By looking at
state-produced newsreels and documentaries, monuments built for the victors, parades, political science
textbooks, and works written by Francoist historians,
Aguilar demonstrates that Franco had to both legitimize his illegitimate rise to power and find ways to
continue justifying his rule in the Jatter years of his
regime. To establish his legitimacy, official culture
portrayed Franco as the savior of a nation that was
riven by political, class, religious, and nationalist strife.
In turn, as the crusader, Franco had to punish those
who had fought on the Republican side. Over time, the
official discourse about the war changed. From the
mid-1950s on, the regime portrayed itself as the keeper
of "twenty-five years of peace." Because of this peace,
it contended, the Spanish economy thrived. This new
narrative reflected the Franco regime's desire to merge
what Aguilar calls "performance-based legitimacy"
with "origin-based legitimacy." At the same time, the
discourse in some political science textbooks and
history books began to treat the vanquished in more
conciliatory terms, calling for some form of toleration
and coexistence with old enemies. Aguilar buttresses
these arguments with solid textual evidence.
The final chapter is the most compelling: a discussion of how the transition's political actors were
haunted by what they perceived to be the lessons of the
republic and war. Aguilar emphasizes that it was "the
memory of historical misfortune and the fear of the
dangers of radicalization [that] contributed most to
moderating the demands of all the important political
and social groups of the time" (p. 151). All of the
parties involved tried to create a democracy through
political institutions that were different from those of
the fractious Second Republic: namely a bicameral
parliament, proportional electoral law, and a monarchy. She provides fascinating accounts of how people
argued for completely opposing positions—for or
against proportional representation, for examplebased on their perceptions of what went wrong during
the republic. Obviously, this generation of politicians
learned some lessons about the collective costs of civil
war, but as Aguilar also hints, one could also say that
they learned about the price of terror and dictatorship,
and it is this dialectic that shaped Spain's transition to
democracy.
SANDIE HOLGUfN
University of Oklahoma
RONALD S. LOVE. Blood and Religion: The Conscience
of Henri IV 1553-1593. Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen's University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 457.
$65.00.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1223
Henri of Navarre is remembered as one of France's
most popular prerevolutionary monarchs, but the beginning of his reign was anything but auspicious. He
succeeded to the throne in 1589, after the assassination
of Henri III. His claim to rule derived from Salic law,
which governed succession to the throne. By tradition
and popular belief, however, France's kings were of
the Catholic faith, and Henri was a Calvinist. Thus, in
the eyes of many, Henri of Navarre could not be the
legitimate king of France until he joined the majority
church. He did so in 1593, but his motivations for
converting have been the object of speculation and
suspicion from his time to ours. What part did sincere
religious belief play in his religious change, and what
part political opportunism? Henri's opponents in the
sixteenth century accused him of cynicism and attributed to him the quip: "Paris is worth a Mass." Some
historians agree and think of his religious loyalties as
based on purely political considerations. Others contend that his religious convictions were serious, if
tempered by political pragmatism. Yet another group
argues that Henri eventually became a sincere Catholic. Ronald S. Love has revisited the issue with painstaking attention both to Henri's religious beliefs and to
the political dilemmas he faced.
By virtue of his upbringing and social rank, Henri
was caught between two imperatives: that of blood and
that of conscience. As Love shows, Jeanne d'Albret,
queen of Navarre, instilled in her son recognition of
his lineage's position and responsibilities. With the
demise of the Valois dynasty, Henri's Bourbon clan
stood next in line for the throne. Therefore, he claimed
the crown in 1589 firmly convinced of his right to it by
inheritance. But Jeanne d'Albret had just as determinedly instilled in her son the Calvinist faith. He was
caught between the competing demands of blood and
religion from his earliest days. The young prince of
Navarre was a pawn in the political and religious
conflicts of the mid-sixteenth century. Before the age
of nineteen, he had been forced to change his public
profession of religion four times. He was baptized a
Catholic in 1554, but his mother confirmed him in the
Calvinist faith in 1560. His father, Antoine de Bourbon, who allied himself with the Catholic monarchy,
brought Henri to court, isolated him from his mother,
and pressured him to renounce Calvinism in 1562. This
stay in the Roman Church was brief, and after Antoine
de Bourbon's death, Catherine de Medici allowed the
young prince to return to his mother's faith. Henri's
marriage to Catherine's daughter brought him to court
again in 1572. When the wedding festivities dissolved
into the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, Henri
became a captive of the court. His survival now
depended on adopting Catholicism. But when he escaped in 1576, he once again returned to Calvinism.
Henri's history of religious changes raised suspicions
about the sincerity of any conversion he made as king.
But so too did his political jockeying in the years
between his accession and final abjuration. During
these years, Love insists, Henri remained true to his
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2003