A city with many Franciscos. On logics and genealogies of violence, from francoist military trials to democracy archives

Abstract

Researching Francoist judicial records leads to a particular issue: why a 21^st century historian and a judge from 1939 may formulate the same questions? Although the debate on Francoist violence has undergone a profound renewal in recent decades, there has been little questioning of the origin of the documentation that investigations use as a "source". Based on the occupation of Madrid at the end of the Civil War as a case study, this article highlights the continuity between the production of information by the Auditoría de Guerra del Ejército de Ocupación, the highest military-legal authority after the proclamation of the "state of war", its conversion into documents with a repressive purpose, the vicissitudes of its archival management and the historiographical interpretation of Francoist occupation violence. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to draw attention to the epistemological and hermeneutical consequences of naturalizing the document as a "source" and the "archive" as a documentary repository. Analytical resources from the socio-cultural history of violence and from the historical archivistics background will be mobilized to deal with this argument. This text also presents the notion of "punitive archival practice" as a useful tool for renewing interpretations of the logics of rebel/Francoist violence.