Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea (Mar 2020)
La improvisación de la «ira sagrada» del ’36. Un enfoque microhistórico
Abstract
The political-religious conflict of the 1930s cannot be understood only from Church-State relations, parliamentary discourses, violent demonstrations or anticlerical legislation. When we look at the pressure of anticlerical bases, the struggle for identities and symbolic practices, the secularization of public space or a more territorialized view appears to us in all its complexity. If we focus on the analysis of anticlerical violence in the republican quinquennium we find, basically, a response to power when we observe its peak moments, but not a “religious persecution”. It had nothing to do with what had happened since July 18, 1936, when there was a turning point. The religious factor then acquired a central role in the design of the rebel propaganda strategy (“crusade”) and “sacred anger” constituted the beginning of revolutionary violence. These pages attempt to corroborate, starting from a micro-historical framework, this turn in anticlerical violence, and to see how, in the summer of 1936, its iconoclastic and clerophobic repertoire was improvised in those areas of the Republican rearguard that lacked violent precedents to facilitate the start of the revolutionary process.
