Journal of Contemporary History 2017, Vol. 52(1) 148–156 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022009416678803 journals.sagepub.com/home/jch Symposium Republic, Civil War and Dictatorship: The Peculiarities of Spanish History Julia ´n Casanova University of Zaragoz, Spain The civil war is the central event in twentieth-century Spanish history. Since that summer of 1936, essayists and historians have attempted to explain its causes and consequences, the most intense conflicts and the politics that shaped them. No period in the history of Spain has generated so many books, testimonies, debates and such bitter disputes. Yet in spite of everything that has been said and written, propaganda, manipulations, subjective narratives and black-and-white explan- ations have made any basic agreement very difficult. The long dictatorship of Franco, who for four decades, until the very end, killed, imprisoned, tortured and humiliated the defeated, those in the resistance and dis- sidents, blamed the Republic and its leading figures for having caused the war, stained its memory and millions of Spaniards grew up with that memory in national Catholic schools. The transition to democracy did nothing to recover its more positive side, that of its laws, reforms, dreams and hopes, lumping together the Republic, the war and the dictatorship, a tragic past it was best to forget. Nor is it easy to overcome the quite widespread essentialist view that the civil war was the result of ancestral hatreds in a country with a historical identity and destiny very prone to ‘fraternal’ violence. Following decades of Francoist propa- ganda control over republican guilt, since the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy a kind of moral equivalence in sharing out the blame for the causes of the war and the violence unleashed, an inevitable conflict due to those unresolved festering historical animosities, gained ground. Against that political use of the past, a diverse group of Spanish historians who came into the universities at the end of the dictatorship and the early years of the transition to democracy, following the path opened up by the work of Hispanists – particularly from Great Britain and North America, the first to challenge the myths of the Crusade with academic methods – uncovered new sources, discussed the Corresponding author: Julia ´n Casanova, University of Zaragoz Calle de Pedro Cerbuna, 12, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain. Email: casanova@unizar.es