Conversation with Paul Preston

The publication last year of Paul Preston’s book, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, on the repression during the Civil War and the years immediately afterwards was unanimously acclaimed as a major event in the field of historiography. Preston reconstructs the atmosphere of the 1930’s, the years in which the hatred that exploded during the war was incubated, and describes the eruption of violence that began on 18 July 1936 and lasted until the early 1940s, the massacres committed by Franco’s army as it advanced, the excesses of the Republican rearguard, and Franco’s subjugation of the country once the war had ended.