Resumen

RESINA, Joan Ramon. The Depletion of the Transition Pact: Historization and Symbolic Violence. Hist. graf [online]. 2014, n.42, pp.15-33. ISSN 1405-0927.

The Spanish Transition to Democracy entailed the deliberate neutralization of memories that were still vivid in the mid-1970s. November 22, 1975 was not the downfall of a tyranny but the transfiguration of a regime that survived itself due to the people's passivity and the complicity of a large part of the population. The Transition was not the democratic reinvention of the State so much as a temporary transference of the institutions in order to ensure their functional continuity. In its historical dimension, the Spanish Constitution is what Freud called a screen-memory, a metaphor for a censored knowledge which must be continuously repressed to prevent it from emerging into the public light. To the work of creating screen-memories historians have contributed enthusiastically, from those associated with the conservative Real Academia de la Historia to more liberal ones who collaborate with the former in uprooting heteronational memories in order to delegitimate the claims to rights that are historically based; in other words, to promote in the peripheral nationalities the historical discontinuity that conservatives have already achieved in the rest of the State.

Palabras llave : Transition; democracy; memory; Spanish Civil War; franquismo; amnesty; historical relativism; constitution; nationalism; Euskadi; use of history.

        · resumen en Español     · texto en Español     · Español ( pdf )