Book Burning

From the very beginning, Francoism was a regime based on repression and ideological and social exclusion. Cultural repression was based on the burning and cleansing of publications, censorship, and the control of information. Book burnings, as a means of annihilating the ideas of what it called the Anti-Spain, were a commonplace in the Francoist rearguard. Bonfires in the main squares of the places it conquered became a founding act of the New State. The purifying fire would do away with the freedom of the press and of thought which, according to the military and ecclesiastical authorities, had poisoned the minds and spirits of good Spaniards. After 18 July, sound and fury rained down on the publications of public and private libraries, publishers, bookstores, and newsstands

These activities recalled the systematic burning of books in Hitler’s Germany organized by the Propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in 1933. These made such an impact that the US magazine Time talked about a “bibliocaust”, while its counterpart, Newsweek, referred to them as a holocaust of books.

The first measure dealing with the purge of books and control of reading taken by the rebel National Defence Council was the Order of 4 September 1936, which accused the Republic’s Education ministry of distributing Marxist books to children. A decree issued nine days later declared all the people, parties, and political groups belonging to the Popular front illegal and ordered the seizure of their books and libraries. On 23 December 1936 the State Technical Council issued a decree banning all socialist, communist, libertarian, pornographic, and other corrupting publications. This decree shared many similarities with an earlier proclamation on the seizure and elimination of books from General Queipo de Llano, commander of the Army of the South. The rebels’ persecution of books explains why one of his first proclamations, on 4 September 1936, ordered that pornographic and socially corrupting printed matter be handed in to the military authorities and that offenders be punished. Falangists and soldiers went to great lengths to destroy all kinds of publications.

With the capture of Madrid at the end of March 1939, the time had come to clean up the books of the city, and all of Spain, as this still taken from the Noticiario español, and colourized for Manuel Menchón’s 2021 documentary Palabras para un fin de del mundo, shows.