Guardianes del Honor. Los guardias civiles y la historia de su institución durante la Segunda República

Abstract

The Civil Guard is an essential part of the story of the political violence that plagued the Second Republic, and its history has largely been written by members of the institution itself eagerly de­fending its honour. This article traces how spe­cific incidences of violence during the Second Republic were portrayed by Civil Guard histori­ans in books and history magazine articles from 1968 to the present, and in so doing it will demonstrate that, even as Spain shifted from a pub­lic order to a citizen security model of policing during the Transition, these historians remained trapped by a Francoist vision of the Civil Guard gaining honour through dispassionately fight­ing the disorder of the Second Republic. The vi­sion was so engrained that only a new generation trained after the Transition was able to find a new narrative that portrayed the Civil Guard as serv­ing the interests of the public. Still, the unwaver­ing desire to uphold the honour of the institution has meant that this new generation also depicts the corps as apolitical.