Spain honours Franco victims

A new project will record what happened to academics who lost their jobs as a result of Franco's purges of Spain's universities after the Spanish Civil War and will honour their memory.

By 1945, a third of professors at Madrid's Complutense University (UCM) had lost their jobs; some had gone into exile and a few were in jail. The list includes famous names such as philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, writer Francisco Ayala and Juan Negrín, a former Prime Minister. The damage to Spanish academia was great.

The project will be the first task of the new chair for the recovery of historical memory in the 20th century, headed by Julio Arostegui. The historians Luis Enrique Otero and Mirta Nuñez will produce a brief biography of each professor, to be published in a book next autumn.

Spanish science and culture enjoyed something of a renaissance in the early 20th century. But this was cut short by the outbreak of war in 1936 and killed off by the Franco regime.

The cream of Spanish intellectuals left for exile in Mexico, Argentina or France, and after 1939 all tenured academics had to submit to special tribunals. "All those with any links to the ideals of the republic were punished," Professor Otero said.

Within five years, a quarter of Spanish professors had been hounded out of their jobs. UCM was particularly hard hit, losing 54 of its 165 professors.

Juan Francisco Tello, a disciple of Spain's most important scientist, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, was expelled from UCM. "Only when he was months away from retirement was he allowed to take up his post again," Professor Otero said. "By that time, his academic career was over."

Physicist Arturo Duperier spent the Civil War and the Second World War in Britain, where his work on radar helped the war effort. He returned to Spain in 1950, hoping to continue his work with equipment donated by his British colleagues. But the equipment was confiscated by Spanish Customs, never to be seen again.

Although Professor Duperier was eventually readmitted to his post, he was allowed to teach only first-year students.

"Spanish universities have still not totally recovered even after 25 years of democracy," Professor Otero said.

This willingness to re-examine the events of the war and the dictatorship that followed is growing in Spanish society. Groups calling for the identification and reburial of victims have mushroomed in the past five years, and the Government is preparing a law to compensate the victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime.

"When a significant part of the population had benefited from the regime, it was thought that the only way to manage the transition was by forgetting the past," Professor Arostegui said.