OBJECTIVE OF RESEARCH
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán already warned us: the lie of that regime was visual, first and foremost. And he called on historians to disassemble that operetta regime of bloody comedians. With his permission, his warning inspired us to establish the main features of this study.
The theater where the search is represented is the dictatorial regime imposed through a military insurrection that degenerated into a civil war. The stage is the University of Barcelona after the loss of republican autonomy and subject to clearance and a controlling ferry by the winners. The actors in the main roles: Professor Jaume Vicens i Vives, his work - in particular the creation of the Center for International Historical Studies (CEHI) - and the relationship with his disciples and collaborators. The work to be interpreted starts from a first question: How was it possible to study History at the University of the National Catholicism of the 40s and 50s? And he wants to find out what the beginnings of CEHI were in 1949.
Our hypothesis is that despite the break -tractical and painful- and the change in direction that represented the new way of conceptualizing and organizing the society that the Franco regime started, there were certain margins of maneuver from within the regime. The object of the investigation does not focus on the opposition and the external or internal resistance to the regime, nor on the corprenedors effects of the machinery of repressive violence that the regime encouraged. In that regime based on corruption, in a conception of justice in reverse and with such an aberrant motto as intellectuals die, work is an approach to that context in order to understand the genesis of an institution, the CEHI and how its creation was possible in such a poor climate; what objectives he pursued, what needs he came to cover, what the strategies were and what tolls they had to take or pay.
The time frame marks the biography of the main actor and takes shape with the resumption of the teaching activity of Professor Vicens at the University of Barcelona in 1948 and ends with the sudden disappearance of this one in 1960.
