The Portraits of Franco, José Antonio and the Crucifix. Construction of National Identity in Post-War Schoolchildren

The memory of the post-war schoolchildren keeps the memory of a childhood marked by the imprint of national-catholicism. The close link between Church and State after the end of hostilities laid the foundation for the construction of national identity in students. In this article that we present, the narrative of children’s experiences of the population group born during the war, allows us to recompose how this idea was transmitted through the interaction between the student and his closest context. Through the biographical - narrative methodology, centered on four life stories made up of two men and two women from the popular classes whose childhood was framed in the 1940s, we deepened the consolidation of Franco’s political, religious and moral ideology through teachings that boys and girls received in school and were strengthened from other non-formal learning, learned from family and social relationships. We found that the use of oral sources reveals the formation of very relevant elements of the construction of national identity, especially the most properly subjective ones, such as the naturalization processes of discrimination, the assumption of arbitrariness of power or value of routines, symbols and religious or patriotic celebrations.