Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo, "The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

Jan 18, 2026

Jorge Marco, a historian and co-author of *The Fabric of Fear*, dives into the chilling aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. He reveals how Franco's regime utilized mass repression and military trials to build a totalitarian state. The Catholic Church played a crucial role, categorizing individuals and reinforcing fear through societal denunciations. Marco discusses the brutal conditions in prisons and the long-term impact of surveillance on released prisoners. His insights into everyday violence and community fractures provide a haunting look at this dark chapter in history.

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INSIGHT

The 'Community Of Death' Binds Perpetrators

Mass killing and rituals created a bonded 'community of death' among perpetrators.
Those bonds later became socially invisible even as they reshaped local communities.

INSIGHT

Church Rhetoric Glued Rightist Factions

The Catholic Church framed the war as a crusade and split the world into faithful and anti‑Spain.
Church rhetoric helped glue diverse right‑wing factions into the Francoist ideology.

INSIGHT

Document Recovery Enabled Planned Repression

Document recovery and police-intelligence units planned systematic repression from occupation moments.
Archives like Salamanca preserve million‑card files that enabled targeted post‑war purges.

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Jorge Marco and Gutmaro Gomez Bravo's book The Fabric of Fear: Building Franco's New Society in Spain, 1936-1950 (Liverpool UP, 2023) deals comprehensively with the process of Francoist state- and nation-building in Spain. Franco's chosen tools were mass repression and cleansing, undertaken both during the battlefield war of 1936-39 and in the decade afterwards, when war against defeated constituencies continued by institutional means. Mobilising its grass roots supporters made them complicit in the state's project. The complex process of cleansing and conversion of the political enemy required classifying soldiers from the defeated Republican army and Republican-zone civilians into pro-Franco, indifferent, or internal enemy. Many of the latter were either extrajudicially murdered or executed after cursory military trials. Classification used ultra-traditionalist Catholic means, including segregation and forced conversion.

The new society programme implemented between 1936 and 1950 was applied nation-wide to political activists, members of Republican parties, labour organisations, and (poor) urban and (landless) rural social constituencies. The Francoist project adapted to the changing national and international contexts across the period 1936-1950: from a civil war; through the period of relations with the Axis powers at the same time as receiving Nazi assistance in building up Franco's police force as an agent of repression; to the transformation of Franco into an anti-Communist client of the Cold War West. The Fabric of Fear addresses the social effects of the cleansing process on both victors and vanquished. On the one hand, Franco's violent policy forged a new society and tightened the links between the regime and its social base. On the other hand, the violence and coercion exerted on the vanquished resulted in their civil and legal death: they were expelled from Franco's national community and deprived of all rights in what became de facto an apartheid society in Spain.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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