Revisionism is a term which emerged in the late 1990s and is applied to a group of historiographic theories related to the recent history of Spain.

According to users of the term, revisionists oppose what is presented as a generally accepted, orthodox view on the history of the Second Republic and the Civil War. Those who oppose the term view it as deprecatory and abusive.

Both advocates and opponents of the term accuse each other of pursuing a hidden political agenda; those dubbed revisionists are branded conservatives or post-Francoists, their opponents are branded progressists and left-wingers.

Until the late 1990s in Spain the term revisionismo histórico was applied to various historiographic debates abroad, often though not always related to Nazism. It was seldom used against the local background and its denotation could have varied, e.g. in 1988 the expression was employed to stand for scientific historiography. According to scholars who later confronted revisionism, this general setting changed in the mid-1990s; the new government of José María Aznar launched a bid to revise the dominant historiographic view of the recent past. In administrative terms the scheme was embodied e.g. in Plan de Mejora de la Enseñanza, a scheme aimed at re-design of the school curriculum, in 1997 proposed to the Cortes and eventually rejected. In parallel the Right-wing administration mounted a public-discourse counter-offensive, which climaxed in "Operación Moa". Its supposed result was commercial success of 3 books which appeared on the market between 1999 and 2003; written by an amateur historian and far-right propagandist Pio Moa, they focused on the Second Republic and the Civil War.

Moa's books triggered adverse response. It was first embodied in a 1999 manifesto titled Combate por la historia; signed by historians, writers and public figures, it was the first to apply the term "revisionistas" to a group of unnamed Spanish historians, charged with distortions and falsifications. In the early 21st century the name filtered into newspapers and the phenomenon became a widely discussed topic, especially that also other books charged with revisionism were selling very well. According to some scholars, the second term of the Aznar government reinforced the revisionist efforts, expressed e.g. as another education plan advanced by Real Academia de Historia. The anti-revisionist backlash climaxed in 2005–2006 as 3 books produced by professional historians and edited by Alberto Reig Tapia and Francisco Espinosa Maestre; the volumes supposedly definitely dismantled the revisionist Moa narrative and at the time they were thought to have terminated the debate.

Instead of dying out, after 2005 the debate on revisionism flamed on and was brought to another level. To some extent sustained by adoption of Ley de la Memoria Historica in 2007, the discussion transformed when a group of professional historians challenged the anti-revisionists; from that moment onwards the conflict was no longer between amateurs and scholars, but between the scholars themselves. It reached another milestone in 2010–2011, the years when Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García published a general work on the Second Republic and when RAH-edited Diccionario Biográfico Español published a biography of Francisco Franco. The latter caused heated controversy mostly in popular discourse; according to many, the biography was revisionist and scandalous. The former had a low-profile but more lasting effect, and became a negative point of reference for many works confronting revisionist historiography. The discussion on revisionism kept escalating and assumed increasingly militant tone. The next milestone was reached when in 2014 Stanley G. Payne published his biography of Franco (co-authored by Jesús Palacios Tapias); at that point some concluded that revisionism was embraced by the world's most distinguished Hispanists. Since then the debate has reached an unprecedented level and spilled over to global historiography. It is also reflected in 2018 debates related to proposal of a new Ley de Memoria Histórica.

Some scholars who confront the revisionist tide claim that the term "revisionism" as such is not by default deprecatory and some authors considered champions of anti-revisionism declare themselves revisionists, naming skepticism a recommended historiographic approach. They note that authors who strive to re-write history of Spain of the 20th century do not actually deserve the name of "revisionist" and should rather be called manipulators and liars; they are dubbed "self-proclaimed revisionists". Others reserve the term for intellectuals like de Felice, Nolte, Lachmann or Furet and underline that the likes of Moa or Vidal are nowhere near their stature. There are authors who agree that the name has been abused and label their opponents rather as "pseudo-revisionists". Finally, some scholars distinguish between "revisionism", the term reserved for amateurish writings of Moa or others, and "neo-revisionism", the term applied to scientifically grounded works pursuing similar yet not identical views. Finally, few authors note that historiographic revision is generally welcome and needed, but "revisionism" by default stands for revision based on manipulation and has no place in the academic realm.

Most authors who rebuke attempts to distort and falsify history do not go into such detail and refer to "revisionismo histórico" and "revisionistas". The name denotes an attempt to revise a generally accepted, proven scientific version of recent Spanish history and is applied to both "historiadores coyunturales" and "historiadores profesionales"; recently the term is applied not only to professionals in historiographic science but also to scholars who until their "enigmatic evolution" had been global icons of scientific Hispanism. Sometimes in such cases the term is qualified as perfectly respectable scientific "revisionismo amable", yet usually no such distinction is made. At times revisionism is divided into purist and comparative branches. Sometimes two labels associated are "denialism" and "negationism", as the authors in question deny or negate generally accepted and supposedly proven historiographic concepts.