The Tree of National-Catholic Knowledge: The Origins of the Spanish National Research Council

Abstract

The Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council) was created by the Franco’s dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War, as an implement for its scientific policy. The new institution should combine science and Catholicism under an impossible scientific program. The principal goal for CSIC was to break with the immediate past, above all the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE), an institution that had enhanced the level of Spanish science during last three decades through modern science. CSIC took advantage of its material heritage, but it did not share with Junta any scientific, ideological or intellectual canon. The war and the purges at the universities made impossible any continuity with the work of JAE.