To Forgive or to Forget? Spain’s Struggle with Franco’s Legacy
The “Valle de los Caídos”, Francoist national monument and Franco’s former resting place. Image courtesy of Sigilis via Wikimedia, © 2011, some rights reserved.
As an Erasmus student in Madrid, I often use the weekends to explore the city. In this search for daytrips, it has struck me as strange that there are no museums on recent Spanish history in the country’s capital. Famous art galleries like the Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza give some insight into the story of the Iberian peninsula, but where in London there is the Imperial War Museum, the British Museum and many more, a Google search for history museums in Madrid provides surprisingly few results. The absence of history museums may seem insignificant, yet it hints at a persistent problem in Spanish society: the lack of a unified narrative on the country’s recent past. Almost 50 years have passed since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and yet still there is no consensus on how to tell the story of the last century. Indeed, Franco continues to cast a long shadow, provoking strong opinions among Spaniards even today. The divisions caused by Franco’s dictatorship, and the civil war which preceded it, have not been resolved and remain a defining feature of the Spanish political landscape. Is it necessary for a country to confront its past in order to truly forgive and forget? Or is it simply too difficult for Spain to reopen those wounds almost a century on?
Franco speaking in Eibar in 1949. Image courtesy of Indalecio Ojanguren via Wikimedia, © 1949, some rights reserved.
Undoubtedly Spain’s twentieth century is one that created immense division among the population, not least due to a bloody civil war between 1936 and 1939. The almost 50-year Franco dictatorship that followed only served to reinforce this, with republicans being denied political expression and official commemoration of wartime fatalities only given to pro-Franco nationalists. The Valle de los Caídos or Valley of the Fallen was built during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1940s and 50s and houses more than 30,000 unmarked graves from the civil war from both the nationalist and republican side. However, until recently, it was also the home of Franco’s grave, converting it into a symbol of nationalist victory rather than a memorial to all Spaniards who died in the conflict. Franco’s recent exhumation from the Valley revealed the continued strength of opinion on both sides of the political spectrum and demonstrates the difficulty for any government in confronting matters pertaining to the civil war and dictatorship that followed. A poll conducted prior to the exhumation showed 41% were in favour, 39% against with the rest undecided, a true testament to the continued division within Spanish society about how to cope with its recent past.
Spaniards of all political persuasions have not been given the platform to resolve these differences. One of the foundations of Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s was the so-called Pact of Forgetting. Enshrined in law in 1977, this pact ensured that difficult questions about the civil war and dictatorship would be left unanswered in the pursuit of national healing and reconciliation. There would be no inquest into persecution under Franco, nor would there be an attempt to exhume countless bodies executed by firing squad during the civil war that lay in roadside ditches or mass graves across the country. Perhaps this pact bolstered the fragile beginnings of democracy and so served its purpose at the time, yet there is no doubt that it is responsible for the persistent division within Spanish society and the difficulty of finding common ground when confronting the past.
Some progress has been made in recent years, with a growing demand, especially among younger generations, for an understanding of their history. In 2007, socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his government passed the Law of Historical Memory, handing rights to all victims of the civil war on both sides of the conflict. It also formally condemned the Francoist regime and allowed for the removal of any Francoist symbols from public spaces. As one may expect, this law did not meet with the approval of the entirety of Spanish society. Indeed, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) condemned the law as an unnecessary initiative that reopens old wounds. When PP returned to power in 2011, they vastly reduced funding for many projects relating to the Law of Historical Memory including efforts to identify remains in mass graves. This lack of consensus between the country’s two main political parties exemplifies that of Spanish society. Franco is still popular with sections of the population and the Francoist narrative that the nationalists saved Spain from atheism and communism remains the truth for some. The need for one unified version of the nation’s history is clear, but so is the immense complexity involved in achieving this.
To forgive or to forget remains a key question for Spain. Some would prefer to brush the civil war and Francoism under the carpet in the name of reconciliation, while others see an open confrontation with the harsh truths of the twentieth century as the only way the country can move on. Both paths create difficulty and, as is clear in the case of Franco’s exhumation, a portion of the population will always be dissatisfied, at least in the short term. Perhaps only when Francoism is no longer in living memory can the wounds truly begin to heal, or maybe the fratricidal nature of a civil war creates divisions that cannot die out so easily. Either way, until a unified narrative can be found, Madrid’s lack of history museums points to a much deeper shortcoming in Spanish society: the inability to confront the demons of its recent past.
