La depuración franquista del magisterio primario

Abstract

The purge of primary school teaching profession, like other groups, was an instrument of political repression organized and planned in order to establish, keep and legitimise the social-political «New Order» that aroze after the victory of Franco's army. There are three points to this article. The first point establishes the state of the question on the repressive nature and conditions in Franco's Spain. The repression adopted against the school teachers has its own quality: it is more preventive than punitive, trying with it to dissuade the pedagogue action of the teaching profession, a group who never had the confidence of the new regime nor the ideological mainstays which support it, including the catolical church. The second point tries to clear this mistrust, which goes back to the times of the Spanish Second Republic; in this mistrust the purge of the schoolteachers has its arguments. The third part studies the purge of Valencian schoolteachers, and analyses its political and social characteristics, concluding that an apolitical and scantily compromised group is purged essentially due to political accusations. Though the accusations were not harsh we can confirm the hypothesis of the preventive purge of the teaching profession, a group the Franco regime needed but kept by fear. The great lozers of this repression were not only the school teachers but the Spanish society itself. A society that saw how the new pedagogy under Franco's regime cut the progress that was finally underway only a few years prior.