Minister tells Academy to alter biography after row over Franco entry

Education Minister Ángel Gabilondo has asked the director of the Royal History Academy (RAH), Gonzalo Anes, to adopt "appropriate measures" to revise and, where applicable, "immediately correct" those entries in its controversial Dictionary of National Biography that do not reflect sufficient academic rigor. Among the biographies that have proved most polemical is that of Francisco Franco, which avoids classifying the former Spanish leader as a dictator. The request was made at a private meeting between the two men at the Ministry of Education on Monday.

At the meeting, Anes explained to the minister the process by which the work was put together, as well as the reasons to justify the pluralism that was adhered to at all times, reported ministry sources.

Gabilondo stressed the position he defended last Wednesday in Congress over the need to revise those entries that lack historical rigor and specified that it was not up to the government to say how to do it. That day, in response to questions from United Left leader Gaspar Llamazares and Basque National Party deputy Esteban Bravo, who harshly criticized the institution, he urged the RAH to immediately rectify the book.

The Dictionary of National Biography was published with the aim of becoming the institution's great contribution to Spanish historiography but has been accompanied by controversy because of the lack of academic rigor of some notable entries. The book contains a total of 43,000 biographies, written by more than 5,000 authors.

As well as the uproar caused by the entry for Franco ? written by an admirer of Francoism, historian Luis Suárez ? there has also been controversy over the entries for Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, which is also by Suárez and attributes his inspiration for founding Opus Dei to God, and other renowned Nationalist military men, which are written with a clear ideological bias.

The board of the RAH has put forward other texts from the book that describe episodes of torture and repression during the dictatorship in an attempt to counteract the critics.

The academy's governing body said that each author was responsible for their own texts and that it had striven to uphold principles of intellectual freedom and responsibility, as well as a pluralism that embraced different historiographical sensibilities.