4 - Totalitarian Ambitions

Summary

Chapter 4 describes how chemists co-constructed the new regime, to the extent that totalitarian political ambitions often converged with totalitarian chemistry projects. In public, aggressive rhetoric against liberal values helped them to reinforce their own professional positions and enthusiastically ascribe to the political and religious values of the dictatorship. The new Francoist chemistry was therefore constructed in strong opposition to the supposedly overly theoretical, elitist, centralised and ‘ideological’ research of the JAE to promote a ‘real’ applied chemistry. The totalitarian dream of the new regime materialised in a new chemistry that had to serve an ambitious reorganisation of the economy of the country through raw materials, industrial progress under strict centralised control and new applied chemistry research lines. Here, the research policies of José María Albareda at the CSIC, the fascist control of the Sindicato Nacional de Industrias Químicas and Emilio Jimeno’s plan for a totalitarian organisation of chemistry in Spain are poignant examples. The chapter also addresses the ways in which the marriage between chemistry and religion contributed to the legitimisation of the regime.