Franco's Prisons (provisional title)

The forty-year Franco dictatorship constitutes -for Europe as well as for Spain -major unfinished business of its violent twentieth century. Legitimised by the Cold War, totalitarian Francoism was permitted as a Western client to transform its society brutally. The book explores how the all-pervasive prison system of the 1940s (including forced labour camps) changed shape during the dictatorship’s subsequent decades. This occurred as Spain underwent a process of accelerated industrialisation and social uprooting (mass internal migration), whose combined intensity was, in European terms, second only to Stalin’s Russia. The book is an original study of Franco's penal system, including the components of it which operated beyond the prison walls. It analyses what Francoism was as a political project under the dictatorship, but also the process by which Francoism has outlived its originating dictatorship to become a virulent form of ultranationalism in a Europe increasingly dominated by the populist right.