Exile, Surveillance and Censorship: The historian Rafael Altamira and the Spanish Nationalist State

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to revitalize the legacy of historian Rafael Altamira, a survivor from Spanish Nationalist State who left the country to live in exile at the end of the civil war. Throughout his life, he also resisted Franco’s regime. The historian was targeted by Franco’s officers, moved to America and established himself in Mexico as an expatriate agent of the resistance in the intellectual field. Because of that he had his works continually submitted to new publishing requirements, such as having passages suppressed in book translations and having books banned or revalidated by the censorship judgment. The aims of the present research are to identify the rules imposed by censorship apparatus and the way it functioned to ban or to allow the partial or total publication of those works. Thereby, we demonstrate the lasting surveillance on those works and their respective authors, editors and readers, subjected to an atmosphere of suspicion and guilt. By means of this study, it will be delineated the vicissitudes of a dictatorial regime which deprived the freedom of expression of intellectuals and which limited them to silence and self-repression. Also, it condemned others to be in exile as a way of cultural survival.