In January 1940 the recently founded National Association of Ex-prisoners (‘ex-cautivos’), constituted by those who had suffered imprisonment in the Republican zone during the civil war and led particularly by captives in the Modelo prison in Madrid, produced an emotive public message of loyalty directed personally to General Franco which conferred charismatic status upon him and summarised the special claim on memory of the conflict made by those who were able to portray themselves openly as its victims.

The civil war lacerated the lives of the defeated and of many of the victors, though recognition of this in the aftermath varied greatly depending on opportunity and capacity to partake of the spoils of victory. The wartime experience has been explored in the previous chapter and the aftermath for the defeated will form the main theme of the next. Here, the ways in which the nascent state encouraged associations of ex-captives, ex-combatants and the families of ‘martyrs’ to remember, and how various groups of ‘memory activists’, including Falangists and Catholics, came to construct a sense of collective trauma, will be explored. Many set themselves up as moral witnesses to the tragedy, and they employed the familiar tropes of collective memory after war: ‘redeeming the sacrifice’; ‘the spirit of a generation’; ‘blood irrigating the growth of a new nation’; rebirth and regeneration; the ‘moral values of the victory’: austerity, discipline, vigilance and intransigence.