From barbed wire to monitored freedom: Occupation, punishment and exclusion of the defeated in Spanish civil post-war in the province of Alicante

Abstract

This article studies the violence and exclusion of the defeated after the Spanish Civil War, by using the province of Alicante as a universe of analysis. It problematizes about the implementation of the occupation and the activities of the War Audit, paying attention to the interaction between the military, police and judicial deployment and their local collaborators. On the other hand, it describes the role played by the concentration camps and the penitentiary system in the classification, control and exclusion of the defeated, by means of an analysis of the actors and the forms of violence that accompanied the management of the prison perimeter by the occupation forces. It ends by investigating the responses that the local authorities gave to the policies of release and their implication in the discrimination of the defeated, wich exceed the regularoty framework. These ones were responsible of the decisión about who must integrated in the community or, on the contrary, tobe marginalised. The sources used in this contribution come from different national archives —AGHD, AGMA, AGMS, AGA, CDMA, AHN ACMJ—, and the Provincial Historical Archive of Alicante and from several municipal archives of Alicante.