Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke :
'Raza - a franquistic dream of Spain'

During the winter of 1941 to 1942, the new Spanish leader, General Franco wrote a novel that later became a screenplay for the film, Raza. The film was the first and most ambitious cultural initiative that the new Francoist state realised after its triumph in 1939. It sat the norm for a whole series of nationalistic movies. Franco tells the story of an aristocratic Spanish family living in the Northern part of the peninsula, and shows how the family suffered from the national crisis that struck Spain after the loss of the last colonies in 1898 until the end of the Civil War in 1939. The article analyses the novel, and explains how the Francoism was a special Spanish variant of traditionalist nationalism based on Catholicism and military ideology and not, as often supposed, on fascism.