Understanding the Collective Memory of Francisco Franco
Emily Daly / Jan 7 / Memory
When I moved to Madrid in September 2019, I knew very little about Spanish history, so I was keen to explore its rich and complex past through visiting history museums. However, in all of Madrid, I could not find a single museum dedicated to Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, and yet there were vestiges of his 40 years of rule everywhere.
After having several hushed discussions with Spanish colleagues and friends, I soon realised that a complicated cultural taboo exists around the collective memory of Franco; a pandora’s box which in many ways, still remains shut.
From my own research, I learned that Francisco Franco’s fascist, conservative regime governed Spain from 1936 to 1975, after winning the 1930s Spanish civil war in 1939. Following his death in 1975, Spain underwent a process of democratic transition; Francoist officials and leaders of the democratic opposition formed a constitutional monarchy with Juan Carlos I. In contrast to the international justice movement taking place in other European countries at the time, which advocated the notion that their political pasts should be confronted, Spain chose to forget Franco. This belief was advocated by some politicians and embodied in the unwritten “Pact of Forgetting” or Pacto de Olvido which was given a legal basis in 1977 with the Amnesty Law. The law prevented any criminal investigation into Franco; no social or political group was to take responsibility for the war or the repression that followed.
It has been called into question why Spain, unlike its European neighbours, chose to repress the memory of Franco. Yet unlike Germany, Italy and Portugal, Franco’s regime did not collapse, meaning that members of the political elite were left with the task of transitioning to democracy when he died, and no side was keen to remember the Franco regime out of fear of returning to conflict. As communist leader Santiago Carrillo famously said ‘there is only one way to reach democracy, which is to forget the past’; many Spanish politicians feared that opening old wounds would prevent the nation from healing, as it is important to remember that during the civil war especially, crimes were committed on both sides. It could be argued that in some ways, as Omar G Encarnacion mentions in his book Democracy Without Justice In Spain, that this approach worked, as the silence allowed democracy to develop in Spain, demonstrating that reconciliation is not always synonymous with democratisation. Other countries, such as Portugal failed to democratise quickly following the Estado Novo, as its attempt to cleanse its authoritarian past with a set of policies put it on the brink of war.
While public opinion on whether to silence the collective memory of Franco was divided, some Spaniards did not object to the Pact of Forgetting; a 1975 survey reported that ‘61% of the public agreed with this blanket of amnesty’. There was an overriding fear that the past would reveal divisions in Spanish society, as the ordinary Spaniards who were complicit with the regime, who reported their neighbours to the authorities for a myriad of reasons, would be unveiled. I discovered that a Spanish friend’s grandma supported the Franco regime because it benefited the industry she worked in; many ‘normal’ people were guilty of complying with the regime for their own personal reasons.
Yet attempting to erase the collective memory of Franco came at a heavy price. One of the most obvious reasons is that Franco’s victims deserve to be commemorated. The Pact of Forgetting may have facilitated democratic progress in Spain, but in turn, Franco’s victims have been served historical injustice. It has been argued that The Pact of Forgetting created a ‘false premise of culpability’; neutrality does not condone the torture, murder and other crimes committed by the Franco regime. Accountability was clearly not at the centre of Spain’s political agenda.
Whilst the Pact of Forgetting has undoubtedly drawn a curtain of silence over Spain’s collective memory of Franco, in the 1990s, cracks began to appear. The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) was formed, pioneering a movement to restore the memory of Franco along with 160 other associations. Their efforts involved digging up and exhuming unmarked graves, as well as telling the stories about the republican victims from the war who had been forgotten. Recovering Franco’s memory then became a legislative priority; in 2002, the parliamentary declaration denounced Franco’s 1936 uprising as undemocratic 2007 Historical Memory Law recognised victims on both sides as well as providing support for surviving victims and their families.
Fast-forward to 2019 and Spain can see emblems of Franco’s past re-emerge. This is exemplified by the rise of far-right party VOX, who in December 2019, gained 52 seats, becoming the third biggest force in congress. There is no doubt that the far-right resurgence is happening all over Europe but it has been argued that in Spain, VOX’s ideas and policies echo the Franco regime.
In January 2020, I was on my way to Granada with a Spanish friend and we stopped off at Casa de Pepe, ‘el bar más facha de España’; a bar full of Franco memorabilia, portraits and news clippings hanging on the walls. While my friend treated it as a museum, a cultural artefact, it was clear that the people who owned this bar still fervently supported Franco. It could be argued that by not facing up the memory of Franco, Franco’s supporter’s memories have been able to live on. Many of my Spanish friends fear that the polarisation of the war has come back in the form of VOX.
A few months ago, I was taking a train to the mountains just outside of Madrid and I noticed an imposing, neoclassical basilica stood on a hill. This enormous monument is called the Valley of the Fallen: the former mausoleum of Francisco Franco, alongside tens of thousands of victims from both sides. However, the site was treated as a shrine to Franco by the right and was resented by many Spaniards and politicians, who believe it glorifies him. This led to the socialist government exhuming his remains and moving them to Escorial in October 2019. While this became a subject of extreme controversy, current prime minister Pedro Sanchez argued ‘no democracy can allow for monuments to exalt a dictatorship.’ Clearly, efforts are still being made to condone the terror and crimes committed by Franco, but after thirty years of silence, can the true collective memory of Franco be reconstructed, or will the silence continue to haunt and divide the nation?