The Viceroyalty of General Queipo de Llano in Seville During the Spanish Civil War: A Dialectic of Violence and Destitution

Abstract

This article reappraises General Queipo de Llano's authoritarian rule in Seville during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Queipo's murderous regime has long attracted scholarly attention, but very little research has been devoted to other aspects of his administration. Perhaps one exception to this rule is that several works have attempted to enhance Queipo's reputation, portraying the general not only as a military genius, but also as an economic visionary and architect of a proto-welfare state. Building on the concept of Queipo's ‘kleptocratic state’, the present article not only refutes this myth, but also demonstrates that economic policy was crucial to (and inseparable from) the process of physical repression in Seville. The new regime was thus founded on a brutal dialectic of violence and destitution. Prioritizing the liquidation of their perceived enemies, Spain's military rebels massacred thousands in the city after the coup of July 1936. The economic chaos wrought by the mass-killings soon compelled the insurgents to adopt a series of mitigating measures, but the murderous project was not abandoned. Indeed, as the article demonstrates, even ostensibly humanitarian measures must be regarded as part of a broader punitive, restrictive and ideological rebel ethos.