‘Normalisation’ and society

As Chapter 7 suggested, when significant dates in the life of a people previously in conflict with itself come to be celebrated, questions related to coexistence are reopened, often with great intensity. The Franco regime's solution was to ‘normalise’ history and memory by replacing the crusade narrative with the mask of ‘fratricidal conflict’, supposedly confirmed by ‘objective’ consideration of the past. Neither the new narrative of the war nor state-sponsored history writing permitted the story of the defeated to emerge. Having explored in Chapter 7 the public politics of the past and of memory in 1964, in this chapter I focus on society and social change. Even more than the 1940s and 1950s, the social ‘story’ of the 1960s is of migration. In 1964 alone, according to the Instituto Español de Emigración, some half a million individuals in Spain left their province of residence to live in another. As we have seen, migration presented a possible alternative to the ‘silence’ of reimposed normality in daily life after 1939, especially in rural communities torn apart by wartime conflict. Beginning with ‘Year Zero’ the victors defined what was meant by ‘normality’. The Francoist mayor of a small town in Huelva ignored the bitter local violence of the civil war when he explained in 1963 how ‘once the military passed through, order was restored and little by little things have returned to normal since then’.