Fig 1: Franco and members of the Seville government in a Holy Week procession in 1940
By Claudio Hernández Burgos and César Rina
When it comes to understanding contemporary cultural processes and political dynamics, the study of festivals and popular rituals has traditionally occupied a secondary and anecdotal position in historiography. It has been interpreted as a banal issue, and even a social practice in clear reversion within the paradigm -today surpassed- of secularization. However, dialogue with other disciplines such as Anthropology or Cultural Studies has shown the importance that festivals and local rites have had in the consolidation of certain ways of understanding the world, in the legitimacy of forms of government and in the identity definition of political cultures. This has been the objective of various works that aim to provide a new way of understanding “from below” of the Franco dictatorship, which stood out in its near four decades of existence for its cultural syncretism. This ability allowed it to present itself as the guarantor of continuity with a tradition that was intensely resignified so as to acquire the ideological and behavioral contours that the regime desired.
In recent decades there has also been a historiographical consensus when it comes to understanding the dictatorship beyond its repressive force. On the contrary, from the first stages of the military uprising in July 1936 that would lead to the Civil War and a military dictatorship, the new Francoist authorities relied on the festive rites of communities to integrate them into a legitimising narrative. aNew ritual codes also emerged that were based on festive practices that had special roots and that became, not without tensions or conflicts, ways of celebrating the values of Francoism. Festivities are moments of emotional exaltation and identity, which have the capacity to symbolize and sacralize political ideas in popular contexts, not strictly institutional ones. Hence the Francoist regime´s extensive colonization of these festivals. These celebrations were fascistized, they were mistaken with military parades.The Catholic Church, in alliance with the local authorities, used them to purify the space sullied by the Republic and modernity, and to re-Christianize society. In addition, by congregating a good part of the population in apparently non-political festive contexts, they were used as a stage to represent the scale of hierarchy and power of the New State.
However, these cultural control mechanisms based on festive rites were not free of tensions nor were they solely top-down . Each celebration had its particular notions of tradition that forced the Francoist authorities to develop adaptive skills for each context. In addition, festive settings foster states of social disturbance and moments of temporary destructuring, of communitas in Victor Turner’s terms, which fostered rebellious attitudes. These were tolerated within the spatio-temporal framework of the rite, but also that escaped the control of attitudes and meanings of political power. After the Second World War, many celebrations were reoriented towards a folkloric discourse of a regional variety in Spain whose own notion of differential tradition helped to shape, decades later, certain challenges about the idea of a Francoist nation. Likewise, the associations, brotherhoods or organizing groups had certain licenses in relation to the associative rights of assembly, which could have turned them, at the end of the dictatorship, into opposition spaces.
This work takes a tour of different popular celebrations in Franco’s Spain. The analysis corresponds to the main specialists in the field of Francoist studies, who have focused on the importance of rites in the generation of consensus and the articulation of legitimacies. Each of the chapters is dedicated to a particular party, following a common methodological and expository scheme. They start from a brief analysis of the celebration during the Second Republic, since in many of the cases studied these popular festivals were the strong tensions between the various political cultures for appropriating the meanings of the ritual. Next, the transformations operated by the dictatorship in festive phenomena during the Civil War and the postwar period are discussed in depth, to conclude with the multiple and even contradictory forms that festive rites acquired in the sixties and seventies.
The book deals with the main popular festivals celebrated in Spain at the time, although they are not all represented sinceit remains a pioneering field of scholarship that requires more research. “El Francoismo se fue de fiesta” represents a first global approach to cultural themes that serves as an incentive to future works of greater depth and that are extended to festive rites that have not been analyzed for the moment. The work begins with a theoretical and methodological proposal in which the editors offer some keys to investigate the dictatorship from the popular festivals. Next, the Fallas of Valencia, San Fermín de Pamplona, the Andalusian Holy Week, the Major Festivals of Catalonia, the pilgrimage of the Virgen del Rocío, the role of the Women’s Section in the definition of folklore and tradition in Malaga or Asturias day. The book concludes with two chapters that affect the limits of the Franco regime when it comes to controlling the festivities: specifically in the rural world of Mallorca and in the Carnival of Cádiz. The latter, after an intense period of persecution and prohibition, was reoriented with the argument of tourist attraction in typical Cadiz Festivals.
In short, the study of the festivities during the dictatorship helps us to understand multiple variables, such as the ideological configuration of Francoism, its narratives around tradition, the practices of control of leisure and free time, the attempts to purify the Catholic Church, the hegemonic cultural models or the symbolic articulation of state legitimation mechanisms. Unlike the newly coined political celebrations, which lacked social roots and their organization and significance corresponded strictly to the authorities, the popular festivities were closely linked to local and regional identities and their redefinition contributed to promote Franco’s national project more effectively.
Book: Rina, César and Hernández Burgos, Claudio (Eds.) El franquismo se fue de fiesta. Ritos festivos y cultura popular durante la dictadura. (Valencia, Universitat de Valencia, 2022)
César Rina is a Associate Professor at the University of Extremadura, member of the group: “Use of the Past” at the University of Lisbon. He has specialised in the analysis of the mechanisms of cultural and sacred legitimation of contemporary regimes. Author of “Los imaginarios franquistas y la religiosidad popular” (2015), “El mito de la tierra de María Santísima” (2020) and co-editor of “Franquismo en caleidoscopio” (2020) and “El franquismo se fue de fiesta” (2022).
Claudio Hernández Burgos is Associate Professor at the University of Granada. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds and visiting fellow at the Università della Sapienza (Rome), the London School of Economics and the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid). He is author of several articles in international journals (Ayer, Revista de Estudios Sociales, European History Quarterly, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Nations & Nationalism) and two books: Granada azul. La construcción de la Cultura de la Victoria durante el primer franquismo (2011) and Franquismo a ras de suelo. Zonas grises, apoyos sociales y actitudes durante la dictadura (2013). He is also editor of: No solo miedo. Opinión popular y actitudes sociales bajo el franquismo (2013), Esta es la España de Franco. Los años cincuenta del franquismo (2020) Ruptura: The Impact of Nationalism and Extremism on Daily Life in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (Cañada Blanch/Sussex Academic Press, 2020). El franquismo se fue de fiesta. Ritos festivos y cultura popular durante la dictadura (2022)
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