Irregular war, local community and intimate violence in Spain (1939-1952)

Abstract

Spain was the first country where the anti-fascist resistance manifested itself through the violence of arms, in response to the military coup of 1936 which triggered a bloody civil war. It was also the last to lay down arms in the 1950s after a long post-war period when groups of armed opponents continued the struggle against dictatorship, especially in the countryside. This contribution analyses the specificities of the violence experienced after the official end of the war, as well as that of the groups of resistance and the repression of a large part of the rural population, suspected by the authorities of helping the armed movement. The notion of ‘intimate violence’ accounts for the way this violence was practised most of the time from within the communities, making the internal fractures opened by the war even deeper. Hence, it can also be shown that the reconstruction of a peaceful national community was never an objective of the dictatorship, which on the contrary sought to crush dissent by violence.