Revisionism is a term which emerged in the late 1990s and is applied to a group of historiographic theories related to the recent history of Spain.
According to users of the term, revisionists oppose what is presented as a generally accepted, orthodox view on the history of the Second Republic and the Civil War. Those who oppose the term view it as deprecatory and abusive.
Both advocates and opponents of the term accuse each other of pursuing a hidden political agenda; those dubbed revisionists are branded conservatives or post-Francoists, their opponents are branded progressists and left-wingers.
History
Until the late 1990s in Spain the term revisionismo histórico was applied to various historiographic debates abroad, often though not always related to Nazism.see e.g. ABC 17.11.98, available here It was seldom used against the local background and its denotation could have varied, e.g. in 1988 the expression was employed to stand for scientific historiography.Carlos Seco, Un análisis objetivo del régimen de Franco, [in:] El País 23.07.88, available here According to scholars who later confronted revisionism, this general setting changed in the mid-1990s; the new government of José María Aznar launched a bid to revise the dominant historiographic view of the recent past.Giovanni C. Cattini, Historical revisionism. The reinterpretation of history in contemporary political debate, [in:] Transfer 06 (2011), p. 32, and many other similar claims made by other authors. Also historians who try to stay neutral in the revisionist-antirevisionist debate and strive to take equidistant position versus both camps adhere to the view that Aznar's government intended to impose a right-wing historiographical perspective, see e.g. Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War, Boston 2014, , pp. 31, 38. In administrative terms the scheme was embodied e.g.other initiative supposed to derail public discourse was setting up FAES, Fabian Altemöller, Die spanische extreme Rechte zwischen Metapolitik und Politik: Eine Analyse der Situierung der Nueva Derecha und der Adaption der Nouvelle Droite, Berlin 2017, , p. 212, Xosé-Manoel Núñez Seixas, Andreas Stucki, Neueste Entwicklungen und Tendenzen der postdiktatorischen Geschichtskultur in Spanien, [in:] Stefan Troebst, Susan Baumgartl (eds.), Postdiktatorische Geschichtskulturen im Süden und Osten Europas, Göttingen 2010, , p. 216, Xosé-Manoel Núñez, Ein endloser Erinnerungskrieg? Bürgerkrieg, Diktatur und Erinnerungsdiskurs in der jüngsten spanischen Geschichtswissenschaft, [in:] Neue Politische Literatur 55 (2010), p. 40 in Plan de Mejora de la Enseñanza,full name Plan de Mejora de la Enseñanza de las Humanidades en el Sistema Educativo Español a scheme aimed at re-design of the school curriculum, in 1997 proposed to the Cortes and eventually rejected.Cattini 2011, p. 32 In parallel the Right-wing administration mounted a public-discourse counter-offensive,apart from FAES, its vehicles were the radio broadcast station COPE, electronic bulletin Libertad Digital and privately held popular dailies ABC and El Mundo, Sebastian Balfour, El revisionismo histórico y la Guerra Civil, [in:] Pasajes: Revista de pensamiento contemporáneo 19 (2006), p. 61 which climaxed in "Operación Moa".Eduardo González Calleja, La historiografía sobre la violencia política en la Segunda República española: una reconsideración, [in:] Hispania Nova 11 (2013), p. 26 Its supposed result was commercial success of 3 booksthe most popular of them, Los mitos de la guerra civil, sold at least in 300,000 copies in Spain, see here. The result was typical for best-selling novels rather than for historiographic works, the latter sold at best in tens of thousands of copies. Mitos was also translated into a number of foreign languages and re-published in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2014 and 2018 which appeared on the market between 1999 and 2003; written by an amateur historian and far-right propagandist Pio Moa, they focused on the Second Republic and the Civil War.titled Los orígenes de la guerra civil española (1999), Los personajes de la República vistos por ellos mismos (2000) and especially Los mitos de la guerra civil (2003)
Moa's books triggered adverse response. It was first embodied in a 1999 manifesto titled Combate por la historia; signed by historians, writers and public figures, it was the first to apply the term "revisionistas" to a group of unnamed Spanish historians, charged with distortions and falsifications.see Combate por la historia, [in:] nodo50 service, available here In the early 21st century the name filtered into newspaperssee e.g. La Vanguardia 20.11.02, available here and the phenomenon became a widely discussed topic, especially that also other books charged with revisionism were selling very well.e.g. Paracuellos-Katyn of Cesar Vidal sold at least in 45,000 copies, Manuel Muñoz Navarrete, Revisando a los revisionistas, Dublin 2009, p. 4. Authors of books considered revisionist and published before 2010 were mostly non-professional historians, like Cesar Alcala, Federico Jimenez Losantos, José Javier Esparza or Jose María Zavala According to some scholars, the second term of the Aznar government reinforced the revisionist efforts,"coincidiendo con la segunda legislatura del Partido Popular (2000-2004) y en sintonía con el poder político se produjo un embate revisionista", Francisco Espinosa Maestre, El fenómeno revisionista o los fantasmas de la derecha española, Badajoz 2005, , cover page expressed e.g. as another education plan advanced by Real Academia de Historia.Cattini 2011, p. 33, Antonio Bernat Montesinos, Estrategias de revisionismo histórico y pedagogía del odio, [in:] Annuario de Pedagogía 9 (2007), p. 77 The anti-revisionist backlash climaxed in 2005–2006 as 3 books produced by professional historians and edited by Alberto Reig Tapia and Francisco Espinosa Maestre;Francisco Espinosa Maestre, El fenómeno revisionista o los fantasmas de la derecha española (2005), Alberto Reig Tapia, Anti-Moa (2006), Alberto Reig Tapia, Revisionismo y política. Pío Moa revisitado (2008) the volumes supposedly definitely dismantled the revisionist Moa narrative and at the time they were thought to have terminated the debate.Edward Malefakis, La Segunda República y el revisionismo, [in:] El País 12.01.11, available here
Instead of dying out, after 2005 the debate on revisionism flamed on and was brought to another level. To some extent sustained by adoption of Ley de la Memoria Historica in 2007,Enrique Moradiellos, Revisión histórica crítica y pseudo-revisionismo político presntista: el caso de la Guerra Civil Española, Badajoz 2011, p. 13. The law triggered another historiographic protest manifesto, titled Manifiesto por la Verdad Histórica and signed among others by Federico Jiménez, César Vidal, José María Marco, Pedro Schwartz, Ricardo de la Cierva and Jesús Palacios, Montesinos 2007, p. 55 the discussion transformed when a group of professional historians challenged the anti-revisionists; from that moment onwards the conflict was no longer between amateurs"aparte de Stanley Payne, no les respaldó ningún historiador profesional importante", Malefakis 2011 and scholars, but between the scholars themselves. It reached another milestone in 2010–2011, the years when Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García published a general work on the Second Republic and when RAH-edited Diccionario Biográfico Español published a biography of Francisco Franco.some scholars claim that publication of the biogram exposed "the limits of post-Francoist democratization", Chris Ealham, The Emperor's New Clothes: 'Objectivity' and Revisionism in Spanish History, [in:] Journal of Contemporary History 48/1 (2012), p. 192 The latter caused heated controversy mostly in popular discourse; according to many, the biography was revisionist and scandalous. The former had a low-profile but more lasting effect, and became a negative point of reference for many works confronting revisionist historiography.especially the 2012 volume En el combate por la historia, edited by Angel Viñas, see Ealham 2012, pp. 193-194, Peter Anderson, Knowing and Acknowledging Spain's Dark Civil War Past, [in:] Journal of Contemporary History 52/1 (2017), p. 135 The discussion on revisionism kept escalating and assumed increasingly militant tone. The next milestone was reached when in 2014 Stanley G. Payne published his biography of Franco (co-authored by Jesús Palacios Tapias); at that point some concluded that revisionism was embraced by the world's most distinguished Hispanists.even junior students with no previous scientific contribution do not hesitate to assert that since the late 1990s Payne's "credibility started to decline", that he turned into "almost an apologist of the Franco regime", that his stature "has plummeted from a respectful and significant historian to an almost apologist", and that due to his "propaganda-like work" Payne "has no objectivity"; the MA hopeful then proceeds to lecture Payne and other scholars how a properly written historiographic work should look like, Ascenett Martinez-Lopez, The Spanish Predisposition. Biases within the Historiography and Memory of the Spanish Civil War [MA thesis University of Newcastle], Newcastle 2017, pp. 8 and passim. The thesis was supervised by one of the anti-revisionists, Alejandro Quiroga Since then the debate has reached an unprecedented level and spilled over to global historiography.the debate on revisionism was taken up mostly by British and American scholars, compare contributions of Peter Anderson, Sebastian Balfour, Gerard Blaney Jr., Cathie Carmichael, Chris Ealham, Helen Graham, Stanley G. Payne, Samuel Pierce, Paul Preston, Tim Rees, Michael Richards, Richard A. Robinson, Michael Seidman, Robert Stradling, Nigel Townson and Mary Vincent, see e.g. sections in Journal of Contemporary History or European History Quarterly in issues from 2006 to 2017. Beyond the English-speaking world the topic is barely present though noticed, see especially Fabian Altemöller, Die spanische extreme Rechte zwischen Metapolitik und Politik, Berlin 2017, , and Gabriele Ranzato, Il passato di bronzo: L'eredità della guerra civile nella Spagna democratica, Bari 2014, It is also reflected in 2018 debates related to proposal of a new Ley de Memoria Histórica.for the draft version of the law see here. The authors claim that new regulations are "moral duty" towards victims of the war and Francoism. The opponents claim that the proposal advances "soviet-style regulations". Many revisionist authors (Payne, Martin Rubio, Palacios, Togores, Seidman, Gonzalez Cuevas, Moa) signed a protest letter against the draft, see La Gaceta 15.03.2018, available here
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