Postwar Trials in Catalonia (1939-1978) is a project that attempts to map the incidence of the Francoist repression in Catalonia after the Civil War (1936-1939), and during the posterior dictatorship (1939-1975) and the transition to democracy (1975-1978).
Background of the project
In 2017, the
Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonia’s regional government), in a historical decision, unanimously
voted to declare null the 63,961 court-martial trials that had taken place in Catalan territory under Franco’s administration. Not only that, but it also recognized the illegal nature of those sentences, and granted permission to Catalonia’s National Archive (ANC) to create a list with all the names and available data of all the victims of the aforementioned trials. This gesture, so far unmatched in the rest of the state, signified a pioneer step in the field of historic memory in Spain.
Two days after the approval of this law, the ANC published a
dataset that contained the information of those 63,961 Catalan people who had been illegally tried during those forty years. This dataset contains information such as name and surnames of the victims, age, place of birth, place of residence, type of trial, sentence, if they were sentenced to be executed, as well as the coordinates of the municipality in which the judicial process took place.
This is the dataset selected for this project.
Data and reparations
This project consists of five data visualizations plus a map. The three data visualizations seek to easily represent some of the information contained in the almost 66,000 rows in the CSV file created by the ANC. We polished the dataset with data cleaning sites like OpenRefine that also allowed us to group data into facets and filters and facilitated some of the numbers that were not offered as a separate category in the original dataset. To build the visualizations, this project has used the data visualization platform Flourish Studios, which allows for the creation of multiple and interactive sets of data visualization.
The first visualization (Figure 1) offers some insight into the total number of executions in comparison of the overall amount of martial-court trials. The second one (Figure 2) classifies the recurrence of type of sentencing according to the year the trial took place, and the gender of the defendant. Figure 3 presents a similar information than Figure 1 --executions over the total of trials--, but divided by Catalan provinces during the forty years. This is connected by the information presented in Figure 4, which offers some insight into both the most affected regions, and the migration patterns in the early 20th century that might explain why some provinces like Barcelona quadrupled the amount of court-trials in comparison to the others. Figure 5 is a map that localizes the number of trials for each Catalan municipality. Finally, Figure 6 is an attempt to create a non-geographical map that allows to locate each individual person that appears on the dataset.
Despite using most of the data for all visualizations, some rows were missing some columns of information. For data visualizations relevant to that information, these rows have been omitted. For instance, we have not taken into account rows where the year of the court proceeding was blank the in data visualizations where data is organized temporally. In order to narrow the information and create more polished visualizations we faceted out all the people whose “residence” was not located in Catalonia, but had still endured court-trials in the Catalan juridical system, overtaken by Franco's administration. These (around 3,000 rows) are mostly people who, despite living in other regions of Spain or even in the world (for instance, International Brigaders), were most likely stuck in Catalonia by the time the war ended. This does not mean their experience is less significant, but since most of the classifications are rooted to some extent to the territory of Catalonia, their information often appeared completely disconnected from the categories we were analyzing.
Some historical context
The attempt to give visibility to historical memory in Spain and participate in this particular conversation is, by itself, a very charged action. If there is something that has characterized the post-Franco Spain, it has been the silence that was sealed by 1977’s
Amnesty Law, also known as “The Pact of Forgetting”, in which all the crimes committed by the administration led by Franco (as well as the ones committed during the Civil War) were forgiven. It also marked the release of those who were still in prison due to ideological reasons. This was seen, at that moment, as a crucial step in order to transition from a totalitarian dictatorship to a democratic government, one that could accommodate both victims and perpetrators. Since then, the U.N. has
requested multiple times that Spain derogate this law and investigate the war crimes committed by the Franco administration.
In the early 2000s, organizations like the Asociación por la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) took the initiative to start digging up Republican mass graves. The bodies lying in these graves had been ignored by the Franco administration, while it had made sure that those who had fought on Franco's side were identified and properly buried. Not only that but, in the late sixties, Preston documents in The Spanish Holocaust that there was a deliberate destruction of records and archives that would prevent the access to information about executions, court proceedings, etc. The lack of information and the unwillingness to address any kind of reparations for the Republican victims coming from certain conservative parties has made the issue of historical memory a highly contested one.
Nowadays, the 2018-elected socialist executive is
attempting to pass a similar law to the one approved by the Catalan Parliament in 2017. If so, it would be the biggest step towards victim-recognition taken by the Spanish state since the 2007
Memory Law. This law, while recognizing the pain inflicted by the war and dictatorship victims by both sides, was highly criticized both by conservative parties, that alleged that it only sought to dwell on the past and further divide the Spanish society, as well as by progressive parties, that argued that the law was too feeble and didn’t explicitly condemn the crimes committed by Franco’s administration.
In this context, then, projects such as Postwar Trials in Catalonia work with data that has been hidden from the public domain for many years, and make it not only visible but also accessible to those who might be interested in searching for any particular aspects of this dataset without having to recur to the 66,000 row file. Since this is a big data set that might bring very relevant and useful information to the Catalan public, it is very likely that this project will expand and evolve in the future.