Chapter 7 describes some of chemists’ strategies of resistance to totalitarianism and the co-construction of new, intermediate spaces. Going backwards chronologically, it explores the liberal ethos of the Spanish chemical community in exile after the Civil War and the way in which it evolved in the Latin American context in particular. It also highlights some chemists’ attempts to protect liberal values in the chemical industry, in the universities and in the public sphere in hostile, anti-liberal contexts such as Franco’s dictatorship, as well as how some of them survived as internal refugees. The exiled Latin American chemical community protected Republican values of internationalism and pacifism and combined them with a liberal, flexible relationship (in economic terms) with private chemical firms, but also frequent commitments in favour of public companies (oil, hormones and the extraction of natural products). Inside Spain, some chemists set their own limits of academic power and constructed their own shelters in the press and in their collaboration with private companies. Following the university crisis of the 1960s, and in spite of the official optimism about economic growth, some chemical shelters had begun to challenge the values of the dictatorship, which formally ended after Franco’s death on 20 November 1975.

Chapter 3 discusses how the Civil War dramatically interrupted plans for modernisation, forcing chemists to get involved in war, and the way in which violence, repression and exile divided the chemical community. In the three years of the Civil War, the Republican order progressively faded away and a new dictatorship gained power and social support. War dramatically changed chemists’ daily practices and brought division and suffering to a politically polarised community. Involvement from both sides in the production of chemical gases and chemists’ contributions to strategies of civil defence made the morality of chemistry ambiguous, serving different ideological purposes. Some chemists in the new regime became active repressors, whereas others suffered exile and marginalisation. Political ideology played a crucial role in the ways in which power relations were dramatically reshaped and rearranged, but personal rivalries and professional tensions were probably more important than those expressed in the historical actors’ own accounts. Despite certain tacit trends of continuity, dynamic fields such as physical chemistry, spectroscopy and early biochemistry, which had flourished in the 1930s, had now lost momentum and were reshaped and reorganised. The Spanish conflict profoundly changed contemporary perceptions of science, politics, industry and the military.

The Introduction presents the main historiographical framework of the book, which mainly focuses on the biographies of research school leaders, university professors, internationally distinguished scholars, industrial chemists, policy-makers and chemistry teachers and popularisers in a broad sense, with a particular focus on their role as ‘co-producers of power’. Departing from the analysis of a specific scientific community, at the same time it offers a more general approach to the culture of chemistry in the twentieth century through the international networks chemists created. After describing the state of the art of the history of chemistry and the history of science in Spain in the twentieth century, this Introduction stresses the contribution of this publication to the bigger picture of science in the twentieth century, and also the way in which chemistry and its practitioners shaped science and politics in Spain. It ends with a reflection on the tension between history and memory and the way in which the new presentism and trends of militant history have influenced the writing of this book.