Franco’s repression and Leonese exile

Abstract

Franco’s dictatorship imposed itself on society through repression after the coup of July 1936. Violence, an essential element of the regime, caused persecutions, disappearances, executions, people interned in prisons and concentration camps, economic repression, gender repression and hundreds of thousands of people driven into exile. The Leonese diaspora shaped a map of exile from Europe to Latin America, forming part of the scientific and cultural avant-garde. In Europe many people from León fought against Nazism and fascism during World War II, standing out with their presence in the French Resistance against the Germans, and suffered first in French internment camps and then in Nazi concentration camps, such as Mauthausen. This paper analyses how the application of the mechanisms of Franco’s repression in the province of León forced many people into exile. They are life stories of both anonymous people and people who have been protagonists in the social, political and cultural sphere.