Not Recognizing the Political: Analyzing Franco's Long Dictatorship Through a Genealogy of its Prisoners

Abstract

This article analyzes Francoism through its prison system – from the mass incarcerations of the 1940s (deployed as an instrument of overt political repression) to the gaols of the 1960s developmentalist dictatorship, by which time the majority of prisoners were not activists but the ‘ballast’/‘excess’ of high-speed industrialization/urbanization undertaken without any welfare safety net. The article discusses how the dictatorship conceived of the different groups it incarcerated, how it tried to manage them by ‘divide and rule’ and to what purpose. It explores prisoners’ counterstrategies and the paradox of ‘the political’ in a Francoist prison system which never used the term, yet saw each and every inmate as posing a threat to the dictatorship's ideology of ‘social peace’ (i.e., societal stasis). The article charts a prison transition by the early 1970s, from totalitarian to emerging neoliberal model, the latter still designed to ‘contain’ but no longer to ‘sculpt’ its inmates. Notwithstanding this key change, the article highlights core continuities in the prison system across forty years of Francoism: militarized discipline, rule by secret decree, ‘divide and rule’ strategies, and institutionalized abuse that was endemic and structural.