File of political responsibilities against Mariano Ruiz-Funes García

The Civil War and the violence it unleashed were the midwife of Francoism. The brutal bloodshed politicized and mobilized its political supporters. Broad sectors of society made a blood pact with the dictatorship, but violence also traumatized and paralyzed the rest of society. A society terrified by the idea of a new civil conflict did not oppose, but rather endured or accommodated to, the cruel division between victors and vanquished.

The legitimization of Francoist repression was carried out through a simple and brutal distortion: the transfer of guilt for the outbreak of the Civil War to those who defended the legal order. On 15 February 1939, the rebel side declared the Republican government illegal. The main consequence of this distortion was to consider all opposition to the coup d'état as a crime of military rebellion. The legal framework supporting this operation was the Military Justice Code of 1890, which was applied to the civilian population by the National Defense Junta’s decree of 28 July 1936 declaring of a state of war.

In order to complement this military jurisdiction, the authorities enacted a new body of legislation that further deepened the division between victors and vanquished.  Among the most important were the Law of Political Responsibilities (2/9/1939), which retroactively considered political acts since October 1934 that went against the New State´s principles to be crimes; the Law Purging Civil Servants (2/10/1939); the Law for the Creation of Penal Colonies (11/8/1939); the Law Against Freemasonry and Communism (3/1/1940); the Law of Internal State Security (3/29/1941); the Law of Public Order (9/30/1959). The political responsibilities file shown here, of the jurist and former Republican minister Mariano Ruiz Funes, who was in exile in Mexico, is a good example

This legislation was designed to cement the social exclusion of the vanquished, as well as to punish, humiliate, and, if necessary, eliminate any signs of dissent or opposition to the dictatorship. The enactment of these laws, along with the variation in the rhythms and intensity of violence, allows for the establishment of five different phases of Francoist repression in the post-war period. 

The first phase, of indiscriminate and widespread repression took place during the Civil War. The second phase, from 1939 to 1941, was marked by great intensity and cruelty, and saw a dramatic increase in the penal population and the extensive application of summary procedures. In the third phase, covering the two-year period from 1941 to 1943, the number of death sentences and prisoners decrease due to the implementation of the first measures for reducing sentences, pardons, and supervised release. This was followed by the five-year period between 1944 and 1949 during which the dictatorship experienced moments of weakness due to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and the fight and defeat of the guerrilla (1947-1949) took place. The fifth and final phase, a period in which violence moderated, began in 1950. Of the 150,000 people executed by Francoism, 50,000 - one third - were executed in the post-war period.

ORB