A hombros de la Falange: representation, affect and mourning in fascist Spain

Abstract

After the Spanish Civil War, mourning was a quasi-political affective practice: an emotional performance that cannot be translated to the language of the state but is inextricable from the political. As a lesser known but paradigmatic example, the exhumation and relocation from Alicante to El Escorial of fascist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera reveals how the public display of emotions was assumed to play an important role in the legitimation of political power. It also demonstrated the deliberate work and attention that went into constructing a national emotional hegemony. Relying on a chronicle of the event by veteran Falange partisans Samuel Ros and Antonio Bouthelier and on insights from Alison Jaggar and Margaret Wetherell, this essay shows how emotions are culturally specific performances, deeply embedded in relations of power. The reburial of José Antonio expressed a social group’s feelings but also their interpretation of the political significance of such feelings. Falangist mourning both secured that group’s political standing and challenged the legitimacy of alternative emotional performances, but it also betrayed anxieties about the (emotional, political, aesthetic) challenges of their performance of mourning. These ranged from the identification of nation, party and landscape to the strict division and regulation of gender performances. Despite its best efforts to present a unified emotional landscape and a spectacle of male homosocial bonding, the chronicle registers unspontaneous choreographies of emotion, the struggle for hegemony within Francoist factions, gendered indiscipline and undesired emotional displays that did not conform to the new state’s authority.