Abstract

CANTALICIO SERPA, Élio. Don Ricardo Muñoz Carbonero in the Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (TERMC): Writing, Power and Memory. Relac. Estud. hist. soc. [online]. 2011, vol.32, n.125, pp.209-244. ISSN 2448-7554.

This article focuses on the relation between Freemasonry and the government Franco Bahamonde, as seen through the Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (TERMC). After analyzing summaries from 1939 to 1945, I decided to probe the circumstances surrounding the process against the physician Don Ricardo Muñoz Carbonero, a resident of Valencia. This allowed me to understand the structure of the document and the ways in which authoritarian power embroiled the accused, and also made it possible to comprehend his struggle in the face of the accusation and the authoritarian imperatives to which he was subjected. Under the pressure of the established powers the defendant was forced to dig deeply into his memory, under those circumstances one especially fragmentary and selective. The specificity of his remembering lies in the fact that their evocation was directed bureaucratically on the basis of techniques for gathering testimonies that, in the context, were always conditioned by fear and coercion. Therefore, that memory, captured and registered during the legal process is characterized by a practice of careful selection on the part of the accused and by the limits imposed on him by the Inquisitor at the moment of his declaration.

Keywords : Freemasonry; writing; power; memory; franquismo.