This blog post discusses the harrowing systematic extermination and repression of otherised groups throughout Spain’s civil war (1936–39) and subsequent dictatorship (1939–75), and shows how this trauma remains endemic within contemporary Spain, with the nation’s ‘memory wars’ ongoing owing to the peculiar nature of the memory of its fascist dictator.
I would just like to preface this post by saying that I’m reluctant to perpetuate the Great Man narrative of history — but what ‘greater men’ are there than fascists? — by deciding to write about, and think about and fret about, a single man. However, to ignore him — both specifically by me not writing about him and more generally in our collective memory in the twenty-first century — is to do a disservice to, a horrific forgetting of, the hundreds of thousands of people persecuted, exploited, tortured, and executed under him and his fascist regime throughout a horrifying proportion of twentieth-century Spain.
(As an aside, I’m aware that my interest in Franco and twentieth-century Spain more broadly is, initially through the language I chose back in high school, undoubtedly related to my distant family connection — more like a frayed twig than a sturdy branch from my perspective in the family tree. My maternal great-grandmother, Victoria, fled to the United Kingdom in 1938, from a home destroyed and aflame, I’ve been told. She fled from La Línea de la Concepción—so called because it serves as a line between mainland Spain and Gibraltar — a city in the southern province of Cádiz, Andalusia. This was an area ‘annihilated’ by Franco’s side. I never knew Victoria, nor did my mom, as she died when my mom was two years old. She has hardly been mentioned in family conversation in my life (my grandad’s sister does not talk about any of this), instead being frozen in time in a small picture frame above my grandad’s TV, wearing a dark blue dress, with my mom to her left in light blue, looking impossibly… like a child.)
Background: Conspiracy, Coup, Caudillo
I promise I won’t preface every section of this post, but when war is mentioned, particularly by men, there is often a veneration surrounding it, a glorification of dominance and military history and its focus on weapons, battlefield tactics, and conquest — but that’s for another post. I only mean to provide some brief background information so as to contextualise the man within the conflict, and the conflict within the nation during this period, to allow for the distress of Spain’s ‘memory wars’ to be understood more clearly.
Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892–1975) was first and foremost a military man, and a very successful one, becoming the youngest general in Spain in 1926, aged 33. But to get straight to my point: Tied up in the military is very often a right-wing sentiment, of hierarchy, conservatism, and conspiracy. In early twentieth-century Europe, this was manifested through the intensely influential antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), which made the rounds once translated from its original Russian, and entered circulation in Spain in 1930.
The influence of this hoax cannot be overstated, not least because, as we’re concerned with here, it formed a core part of the rebel coup of July 1936 that instigated the civil war, by igniting and adding fuel to the belief in a Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. This conspiracy stated that these groups were conspiring to achieve global domination and were doing so, in Spain, through the current coalition government composed of socialists and communists. This was the second left-leaning government of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39). This conspiracy was bolstered, in their eyes, when the Soviet Union provided military support to the government during the civil war once it had erupted, because to them, it represented a substantial communist power on the offensive. However, historian Isabelle Rohr has pointed out that there were only around 6,000 Jews in Spain in 1936 — obviously not intent on global domination — a far cry from the apparent ‘Jewish hordes’ that needed to be conquered. Of course, this scapegoating allowed the various factions involved in the coup to unite together, simplifying a complicated political and religious landscape. (This was because many factions on this side of the war had, between themselves, conflicting aims: some wished to restore the recent Spanish monarchy, others wished to restore an earlier monarchical lineage, while others wished to not reinstate the monarchy at all and instead fought to establish varying degrees of clerical fascism and corporatism.)
There are countless reasons for the instigation of the military coup on 17–18 July 1936. One such is mentioned above, which is represented by the Catholic Church’s staggering amount of support for the rebel side — the Nationalists — during the civil war, attempting to eradicate the supposed Jewish-communist-Freemason threat. This was such that many considered the (therefore defensive) war a ‘crusade,’ and all kinds of ideas of racial purity and supremacy were associated, and parallels were drawn between this conquest of Spain and the centuries-long ‘Reconquista’ of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian forces against the Muslims of Al-Andalus (various symbolic gestures throughout the civil war support this parallel).
Other reasons include the physical existence of the Second Spanish Republic in the first place, not just what it conspiratorially represented. The Second Spanish Republic was established to replace the Spanish monarchy following 1931 elections that indicated the nation’s support for a republic. King Alfonso XIII went into exile but did not formally abdicate. This provided those with conservative beliefs — and religious, with tensions rising between the Church and the Republic that did not between the Church and the monarchy — another reason to wish to replace the current government. Initially, the far right in Spain did attempt to take control of the Republic, and were indeed successful, with the CEDA winning the November 1933 elections, maintaining power for two years — referred to as the bienio negro (‘black two years’) — and reversed many of the progressive reforms introduced by the previous socialist government. This particularly affected the landowners and middle class, hence their disproportionate presence on the Nationalist side of the civil war once it broke out, as well as their general support for this political movement before the coup. Those who sought to achieve control through government, by winning elections and intimidating voters, were termed ‘gradualists,’ believing they could implement change top-down, while those who were involved in the later coup were referred to as ‘catastrophists.’ By early 1936, however, the far right were voted out of power and replaced with the left-leaning coalition government mentioned above. With the ‘gradualists’ having failed to maintain power, more violent action was taken.
And so the coup began on 17–18 July 1936. It was coordinated across Spanish territory: the mainland, Morocco, and the Canary Islands, with Franco based in Gran Canaria. Interestingly, he would not have been able to arrive in time from Tenerife had it not been for the sudden death of the Gran Canarian military commander General Amado Balmes. On the morning of 16 July, he was shot in the stomach at a shooting range. Hispanist powerhouse Paul Preston has stated that Francoist historians have downplayed this incident, portraying it as a tragic but fortunate coincidence, while ‘Franco’s official biographers have claimed that Balmes was himself an important figure in the plot [to] counter suggestions that Balmes was assassinated.’ It is interesting to consider, as without Franco being given leave to attend his funeral in Gran Canaria, he would not have been able to make it there in time for his position in the coup because the Spanish government, who had increasingly been exercising power over the military, to the latter’s frustration, had forbidden Franco from travelling there.
Nevertheless, as Preston concludes, ‘[i]t is virtually impossible now to say if his death was accidental, suicide [as some considered Balmes to have Republican sympathies, so refused to join the coup] or murder.’ Franco and his African forces — Africanistas, hardened through years of racially charged conflict in North Africa — then met up with other rebel groups in the south of Spain, airlifted in Junker Ju 52 planes provided by Adolf Hitler. There was no retaliation from the Republican Air Force owing to hesitation and confusion within the coalition government.
Also of interest is that, although Franco was not a main director of the coup — but nevertheless played a prominent part — those who were, José Sanjurjo and Emilio Mola both died in uncertain circumstances, leaving Franco the sole commander of the rebel forces advancing to reconquer their patria. Spanish general Sanjurjo, who had exiled himself to Portugal in 1934 after a failed coup attempt on the Republic two years earlier, was meant to be flown back to Spain, though the choice of transport was questionable: a small, overloaded plane (as opposed to the more suitable Dragon Rapide, that had just arrived in Lisbon with, as Preston states, the almost certain intention of collecting Sanjurjo), but this seemed the choice of Sanjurjo because he was a friend of the pilot of the small plane. Shortly after taking off on 20 July, the plane failed to gain enough air — being small and overloaded — and crashed after clipping nearby treetops. Sanjurjo died but the pilot survived. Almost a year later, General Mola, who was commanding the Nationalist’s northern forces (while Franco commanded the south), died once his plane crashed into a mountain in bad weather. The news was passed to Franco, who received it with an unsettling indifference: ‘At last, so that’s all it is. I thought you were going to tell me that they’d sunk the cruiser Canarias.’
This does seem to suggest foul play; however, there is not enough evidence in any instance to suggest that either death was due to sabotage, but is nonetheless interesting to consider. At this point, however, Franco had already declared himself Caudillo, a term that linked him to the warrior heroes of Spain’s medieval past — with associations of Catholicism, hence the clerical fascism of his political movement — and served as the Spanish mirror to Nazi Germany’s Führer and Fascist Italy’s Duce. During the propaganda campaign to announce this in October 1936, all Nationalist newspapers included the slogan ‘Una Patria, Un Estado, Un Caudillo,’ a clear reference to Hitler’s ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.’
The idea that Franco was the mastermind behind the coup is a myth that unfortunately has been propounded by many on the left. This is not true. This myth, however, has served as ammunition by Francoist sympathisers to attack any criticism of Franco, because if one idea espoused is not true, none can be, they imply.
‘No enemies other than the enemies of Spain’: No Life Left Untouched
The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) had begun, and it would tear the country, communities, and families apart, leaving wounds that are still yet to heal. In the wider, international context, this is not helped by the fact that the civil war is ultimately largely overshadowed by the more expansive fascist conflict that followed, in Europe at least, exactly five months after Franco’s forces marched into Madrid and declared victory on 1 April 1939. (Madrid could have been approached significantly earlier in the war but it became apparent early on that Franco was not interested in a swift victory; he was adamant for a ‘slow war of annihilation’: to conquer the country first.)
(Alongside the civil war erupted a social revolution, which was able to thrive for a time in Republican areas, most notably in Catalonia. A detailed discussion of this is unfortunately beyond the scope of this post, but I have since endeavoured to explore this revolution in my blog post ‘Why Was the Spanish Revolution Unable to Overcome the State?’)
Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust explores in graphic and upsetting detail the human loss of life during the civil war, with figures ranging in several directions but he settles on around 150,000 civilian losses at the hands of Nationalist forces, in the ‘white terror,’ and 50,000 in the Republican ‘red terror.’ The total death toll — civilian and military — is considered to be around half a million people. The ‘white terror’ has been considered by historians such as Helen Graham, Paul Preston, and Antony Beevor to be systematic and ordered from the top, as opposed to the ‘red terror,’ which was more retaliatory and performed by hot-headed collectives — one exception to this, however, is the Paracuellos massacres at the end of 1936.
Such brutality did not cease once the war did. Throughout Francoist Spain (1939–75), executions were commonplace (garrote vil (strangulation) was a familiar method) with the last instance of the death penalty being used in Spain before its abolition (sort of) in 1978 was mere months before Franco’s death in November 1975. The judicial system was corrupt, prisons were overcrowded, leading to hygiene problems and malnutrition. Before the turn of the millennium considered ‘quietly obscure’ in historical memory, nearly 200 concentration camps were built and operated beyond the civil war’s end (some were built by Republicans during the war, but were built to hold far fewer prisoners than were forced in them post-war), where half a million Spaniards and Europeans were ‘de-individualis[ed] and de-personalis[ed]’ and suffered agonising conditions while forced to work the land, such as draining the saltmarsh in Albatera, Alicante. Prisoners included political opponents, the mentally ill, beggars, and any who transgressed Church dogma, such as individuals with a less or non-conformist gender or sexual expression. Historian Javier Rodrigo sums up these ‘perfect laborator[ies]’ as sites ‘of disease, overcrowding and labour exploitation, re-education [through Mass to cleanse their ‘satanic’ mentalities], hunger and violence.’ Rodrigo brings into view influential political theorist Roger Griffin’s theory of fascist palingenesis (‘national rebirth’), reinforcing the Nationalists’ ideology of a ‘crusade,’ with there being a need to cleanse and purify the enemy to establish a new society.
(For more on the concentration camps in Francoist Spain, I couldn’t suggest enough this comprehensive collective effort, in association with Carlos Hernández de Miguel’s recent book Franco’s Concentration Camps: http://www.loscamposdeconcentraciondefranco.es/)
Many prisoners were sent to German extermination camps (considered stateless because of their prisoner and Republican status: within Francoism, enemies were not considered true Spaniards). Censorship and suppression were, of course, rife, characteristic of any fascist state. Poverty was widespread; with many families without a male figure to provide within the patriarchal society, many women were forced into sex work, a profession all the more dangerous under militant religious and fascist rule. A rationing system was introduced, which Preston states intensified social divisions.
Gendered violence was widespread, with rape being endemic to many women’s experiences in prison; the torture was also gendered, and countless children were taken away from imprisoned mothers — and adding this figure to the children taken from unmarried and left-wing women, and families more broadly in a scandal implicating the Catholic Church, a recent chilling estimate suggests 300,000 children were separated from their families in Francoist Spain. Such systemic violence and mistreatment was, as is consistent with such ideology, the lived experience of countless LGBTQ+ people, whom Pérez-Sánchez has referred to as ‘some of the most forgotten minorities in Spain.’ She argues that the greater fluidity in gender and sexual identity expressed by them was not only at odds with the rigid, clerical heterosexist nature of the regime, but this ‘feminisation’ of society paralleled the subordinate, reliant geopolitical position Spain occupied in relation to Western states at the time, extending the anxiety that is consistent with such a regime, thus leading to draconian discriminatory laws and practices. In 1954, the 1933 law of Estados Peligrosos (Dangerous States) was amended to include — as well as political opponents — gay people, thus criminalising homosexuality, with there being two prisons specifically for queer individuals. Many activists rightly consider the recognition of such prisoners to be disproportionately less than conventional political prisoners, and thousands still wait for their Franco-era criminal convictions to be removed owing to frustrating bureaucracy, as many records do not make reference to, for example, homosexuality, even if that was the cause of arrest.
(This article is particularly affecting, sharing six survivors’ testimonies of their lives under Spain’s anti-LGBT laws.)
This attempt at purification of separating the children of the patria from their apparently degenerate and ‘red’ mothers, has been contextualised by Preston — though the persecution of other marginalised groups is unarguably included — when considering the 1937 publication of Eugenesia de la Hispanidad y Regeneración de la Raza (The Eugenics of Spanishness and the Regeneration of the Race) by eugenicist and psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, whose work centred around finding an apparent ‘red gene,’ linking it to degeneracy. He suggested the cure could be found through separating these groups from the ‘healthy’ of society and re-educating them in concentration camps. He was an influential figure in the psychiatric field until his death in 1960 and represents a link between the conspiratorial theories than underpinned Francoism and the harrowing, real-world implications of them.
It has been suggested that the earlier years of the regime were the most repressive, with conditions improving from around the 1950s. 1947 marked the year the last concentration camp was closed, the cleansing operations spanning a total of eleven years. However, forced labour continued, through, for instance, penal colonies and labour camps, where Spain’s ‘enemies’ were forced to build the new society’s infrastructure. These apparent improved conditions provide one instance where Francoist sympathy is noticeable.
Decades into Franco’s stranglehold over Spain — though, by the late 1950s, he had resigned himself to being a figurehead, passing control to a series of technocrats with Spain’s economy stagnating and a famine that polarised the post-war nation further (a dichotomy of mass starvation and cunning profit-making) owing to Franco’s continued characteristically fascist fixation on autarky, made worse by the ruin of the nation’s economy following its civil war — there occurred a ‘Spanish miracle’: Spain’s economy boomed, lasting throughout the 1960s. This has been worshipped to a religious degree by Francoist sympathisers, said to represent the ingenuity of Franco, when instead control was down to the increasingly so-called ‘depoliticised’ neoliberal technocrats, states Preston.
This improvement in living standards is reflected by several academics’ interpretations of the latter decades of the dictatorship. Spanish sociologist Santos Juliá has said that Franco’s ‘ambiguous’ memory is due to the majority of Spain’s adult population not being alive or remembering the most harrowing years of the repression (the 1930s and 1940s) but instead only the later years, where ‘although there was a lack of freedom there was also an improvement in the material quality of life.’
However, is freedom not a material condition? Paul Preston has shown that the regime continued to be repressive through its duration, using state violence against dissenters, as seen in a miners strike in 1964 over the regime’s inadequate attempts to rectify the problem of silicosis owing to awful working conditions. With strikes occurring throughout the 1960s being ‘economic […] in motivation,’ this shows such improvements in living conditions manifested along class lines — though the genesis of a ‘clandestine working class movement’ heralded the beginning of an determination for wage increases. Yet after all, Preston, in his 2013 book, considers such appalling conditions to be necessary for — the cause of — the 1960s economic boom:
The destruction of trade unions and the repression of the working classes led to starvation wages. This permitted banks, industry and the landholding classes to record spectacular increases in profits […] The human cost of forced labour, the deaths and the suffering of the workers and their families were matched by the fortunes made by the private companies and public enterprises that exploited them.
Historiography or Hagiography: Why is Franco Remembered Differently?
Regarding forced labour, a year after the end of the civil war, Franco commissioned construction to begin on a huge project in Cuelgamuros Valley near Madrid. It took twenty years, requiring the forced labour of 20,000 Republican prisoners, with several dying or becoming severely injured. Their work became the Valle de los Caídos (‘Valley of the Fallen’). It is a huge, imposing structure, in the architectural style of fascist classicism, as seen in Mussolini’s Esposizione Universale Roma, for example. The structure — religious in nature with its massive 150-metre Christian cross and its crypt declared a basilica by Pope John XXIII in 1960 — was intended, as stated by Franco, ‘to have the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness.’ It was to linger in our minds forever.
It was built to honour the fallen Nationalists in the civil war, but following Franco’s death (he was buried here) and Spain’s transition into liberal representative democracy, the meaning of the memorial has tried to be rewritten, with it being considered to commemorate the fallen on both sides. (Those who consider this to have been the intention of the monument all along have perpetuated the sterilisation of Franco’s image, dulling the talons of his regime.) However, its function as a site of pilgrimage by Francoist sympathisers puts this more recent interpretation into question.
In order to prevent this and ease the tension for many with this continued, unspoken glorification of the Spanish dictator, his remains were finally exhumed on 24 October 2019 after a long and complicated legal process. This provides a parallel, only in a crude sense, to the exhumations that are occurring all across Spain of the victims of his regime, confined to perhaps over 2,000 unmarked mass graves, which has left families feeling unsettled and incomplete, the civil war and repression unfinished. (The stresses and uncertainty of this coupled with the lost children mentioned above provides a harrowing glimpse into the lives of ordinary families of Francoist Spain, with its effects reverberating to this day.)
The response by many Franco sympathisers calling to leave his remains alone (an El Mundo poll found opposition to be over thirty per cent), that the monument has stood so long as to not be offensive, mirrors many responses concerning statues of historical figures whose power resulted from, or was at least increased by, the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade, with these statues and the monument, as mentioned above, being constructed specifically to venerate a belief. The success of the symbolic nature of Franco’s exhumation is yet to be seen, but with the continued rise of far-right party Vox, the first such party to win seats in elections since Spain’s transition into democracy in the 1980s after Franco’s death (but that’s a whole other thing…), becoming the third largest party in the Spanish parliament, it does not seem promising.
Why is this? Why is Franco venerated so much? In particular, why is he celebrated so much more openly, in the mainstream, that other such fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini? One immediately tangible answer may be that Spain has not undergone a ‘defrancoisation’ on the scale of Germany’s denazification. In an effort for such a cataclysm as the civil war to not occur again, in 1977, an amnesty law was passed which, in effect, pardoned all those responsible for the atrocities of the civil war and the dictatorship by granting them impunity. No such Tokyo Trial or Nuremberg Trials would occur in Spain. This was known as the Pact of Forgetting, with the intention of ensuring that the transition to democracy was peaceful. For this, justice was sacrificed. There is no doubt this has significantly contributed to the more mainstream support of Franco than compared to other dictators, with his regime being ‘let off the hook,’ so the speak, with the disturbing implication that the crimes committed were therefore excusable, that they could be forgotten.
An extension of this disturbing implication concerns the death toll. Could the comparably smaller death toll of the Spanish Civil War and subsequent repression under Franco compared to Hitler and Mussolini’s involvement in the Second World War — with the former’s genocidal ambitions reaching over 10 million — be a reason for more mainstream Francoist sympathy? ‘He wasn’t as bad as other fascists.’ (As an aside, Paul Preston’s use of the word ‘holocaust’ to refer to the extermination of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the civil war and years after is not to parallel it directly to the Holocaust, though exterminatory antisemitism was also central, but to stress that, like the Shoah, it was systematic in nature, and should be analysed as such.) This may link to Franco’s reputation as more isolationist than, for example, Hitler (though that is quite a low bar…), with him only concerned with Spain, having no ambition to spread. Part of this can be put down to Spain’s ruined economy following its civil war, but also Franco’s incessant need to maintain power once he had secured it (this meant, for example, sacrificing sovereignty by allowing the US to establish naval bases in Spain in the Cold War era of the 1950s in exchange for financial aid, thus keeping Franco’s power secure — nothing mattered more to him than his power, and is interesting considering Franco thought the US government to be filled with Freemasons).
Spain’s ruined economy was a significant reason for its neutrality in the Second World War, beginning in Europe only months after the civil war had ended. Perpetually badgered by Hitler to join the Axis powers in the European theatre, Franco frustrated Hitler and Mussolini by shying away (though 50,000 Spanish soldiers — the Blue Division — joined the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in 1941, particularly involved in the siege of Leningrad (here I’d recommend the outstanding 2011 book Leningrad, by Anna Reid)). Franco was also reluctant to declare war on the Allied powers because he was receiving oil and grain imports from them, which they were aware would keep Franco neutral because the quantity of these imports could not be matched if he attempted to make a similar deal with Germany instead.
So, Franco’s neutrality in a war that has almost entirely filled the public’s collective memory since it began in Europe eighty years ago, adds to the sterilisation of his image. Couple this with how Western powers associated themselves with the Spanish Civil War and his image only improves.
Following the outbreak of the civil war, the Western liberal democracies adopted a policy of non-intervention in August 1936, which indisputably aided the Nationalist forces in their victory over the Republicans, as, for instance, Preston states, only the Soviet Union provided military support to the Republicans, which was itself lesser in scale than the fascist states’ backing of the rebels. (The multination voluntary support for the Republic provided by the International Brigades was significant, but was dissolved before the war’s end in 1938.) In Britain, for example, there was not only a sentiment of non-intervention regarding the Republican side, but a belligerent pro-Nationalist sentiment, with the Daily Mail framing the conflict as a patriotic rescue from a nation falling under the control of parasitic ‘reds,’ identical to the purifying ideology that instigated the coup.
This pro-Franco sentiment continued through the decades when the threat to the hegemony of Western liberal democracies shifted from fascism to communism during the Cold War. Mentioned above were the American naval bases. This was because Franco was viewed as the ‘sentinel of the west’ by capitalist states, the final bulwark against the spread of communism through Europe — literally, with Spain’s location relative to the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. Thus, this alliance with Franco, through shared anti-communist sentiment, kept his image in good standing in capitalist states, such as the one I live in.
What of his death? Is this significant? One is all too aware of the bloody and thus memorable deaths of Hitler and Mussolini. But Franco? He maintained power for considerably longer — the ‘most successful of the 20th-century dictators in Europe’ says a review on the back of my copy of Preston’s (nice-smelling) 1000-word biography of the man, a book I started reading the day before what happened to mark 45 years since his death — so one would think this must factor in. But it doesn’t seem to, because of all that’s been discussed.
The extensive duration of his regime seems to have worked in his favour regarding the memory of him, with it being considered a constancy of twentieth-century Europe — an accepted background regime better left alone owing to his anti-communist alliance with Western capitalist states — and then him, an old man, aged 82, simply withering away (though arguably less withering and more internally assaulted, with the exhaustive list of complications) rather than a violent end seen with other dictators. He died on 20 November 1975, from an ‘endotoxic shock brought about by acute bacterial peritonitis, renal failure, bronchopneumonia, cardiac arrest, stomach ulcers, thrombophlebitis and Parkinson’s disease.’ A frail man, who played both sides during the most devastating conflict on Earth and, despite the brutality of his regime, was provided with acceptance by the world’s powers and all their talk of liberty.
(Of note, Franco’s final words, read out on television the morning of his death, reflect how any who opposed the regime or the ‘crusade’ of the civil war weren’t truly considered Spanish — an ethnic othering, the typical dehumanising of the enemy: ‘I believe that I had no enemies other than the enemies of Spain.’)
All of this perpetuates itself. By allowing Franco to ‘pass under the radar,’ so to speak, this allows for greater and easier sympathetic sentiment, further obscuring our interpretation of the past. Historiography becomes hagiography. Nowhere is this clearer than the incredibly mainstream publication of texts that are breathtakingly Francoist in nature. Take, for instance, a recent book, published in 2014: Franco: A Personal and Political Biography (which was the first biography I stumbled across when looking into one on Franco, which has no doubt heightened my awareness of Francoist sympathy). In an interview conducted by Helen Graham in Interrogating Francoism — a book published in honour of his decades of work — Paul Preston discusses how this 2014 publication is shocking in how it omits virtually any reference to Franco’s repression, instead spending its time fixated on ‘how handsome Franco was, how muscular, how gallant.’
Such flattering language directed towards a man like Franco, published so recently and to wide acclaim — based off its Amazon and Goodreads reviews — is dangerous and distressing. One author is Stanley G. Payne, an American historian famous for his extensive work on fascism and Francoist Spain (he does not consider Francoist Spain to be a fascist state), and has collaborated with Franco’s daughter, María del Carmen, to push hagiographic material, such as her 2008 biography entitled Franco, Mi Padre: Testimonio de Carmen Franco, la Hija del Caudillo (Franco, My Father: Testimony of Carmen Franco, the Caudillo’s Daughter), which, frustratingly, is not available in English. Both books were also co-written by Jesús Palacios, who is an ex-neo-Nazi… Carmen was honorary president of the National Francisco Franco Foundation (https://fnff.es/) and is considered a powerful icon by contemporary Francoists, who mourned her death in 2017 at 91.
(The FNFF is ongoing, continuing to glorify Spain’s dictator in a way incomparable to the states of Germany or Italy. In 2017, a petition was signed to call for its prohibition, but less than half the required signatures were received. Further, the FNFF last received funding from the state as recently as 2003, under a conservative government, and the latest information I can find — from 2018 — states it is still receiving tax breaks.)
One cannot help but find this all simply staggering. Can one imagine this situation with any other fascist dictator, or even any staunchly authoritarian leader at all? I don’t necessarily mean the publication of such texts (but to a large extent I do, Payne is a respected academic), I mostly mean how mainstream such texts are, how popular, how easily they flow from the writers’ minds onto the page, into stores, and into our minds.
On Memory: Another Civil War
To begin this last section, I would like to share the insightful words of Spanish historian Julián Casanova:
With regard to the Franco dictatorship, we are now in the “age of memory,” which has brought a return to the hidden and repressed past that is so uncomfortable for many. But we must bear in mind too that this is memory, not history — memory as the social reconstruction of the past and which, as is the way with the workings of memory, sometimes distorts what historians have discovered. Again, the problem goes back to Franco’s dictatorship — precisely because of its lengthy repression and the way it perpetuated its own massive manipulation of Spain’s recent past, it left what we might call a “barbed” memory. For that reason, and like everything repressed, it has returned under a rather different guise, updated by those who have inherited the memory.
In October 2007, the Historical Memory Law was passed in Spain, proposed by the socialist government at the time (under the leadership of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was shot by Nationalist forces in the civil war). It sought to officially recognise those who had suffered during the ruthless years 1936–75, victims of a ‘holocaust.’ Arguably this marked a significant moment in contemporary Spanish history, only furthered by the eventual exhumation of Franco’s remains from the Valle de los Caídos two years ago, because this was a move towards remembering, no longer simply forgetting. (The Spanish conversative Popular Party voted against the bill at the time, however, on ‘whataboutery’ grounds, and the spokesperson for the party claimed the ‘Civil War [was being used] as an argument for political propaganda,’ which, again, like Franco defenders regarding the exhumation, is the typical reactionary response that venerates the status quo.)
The law included the banning of political events at the Valle de los Caídos, the removal of objects which promote the civil war and subsequent repression (in February of this year, the last statue of Franco on Spanish territory was removed, in the Spanish enclave of Melilla), and the identification and exhumation of victims in unmarked mass graves throughout the country, though this has been criticised as the burden was placed on victim associations, leading to a ‘privatisation’ of the exhumation process. However, the budget was severely cut when the Popular Party (PP) came to power in 2011, so it was not until the socialist party returned to power in 2018 did funding increase, with a new law being drafted in 2020. This is the Democratic Memory Law, yet to be passed through parliament. It includes the establishment of a DNA database of victims, with the government also pushing for greater state involvement in the exhumations rather than relying on private associations. The draft also considers sanctions to be enforced on authorities that are slow to begin the removal of Franco iconography — arguably a step forward in the infancy of Spain’s ‘defrancoisation.’
However, the extent to this is questionable. In 2015, several years into the PP’s cuts, there remained over 150 streets and squares — in Madrid alone — that were named after officials of the Francoist regime. In 2018, progressive Mayor of Madrid Manuela Carmena approved the renaming of 52 street names that were connected to Franco. However, semantics has had a powerful effect. One such street name, Calle de los Caídos de la División Azul (Street of the Fallen of the Blue Division), was considered to fall outside of the jurisdiction of the Historical Memory Law because that primarily concerns itself with the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), while the street name is praising the fallen Francoist troops of the Second World War, from 1941. Considering the law is concerned with the dictatorship as well as the civil war, it is interesting to note this odd technicality (unless the semantic argument is that the street name references something technically outside of the regime, but in any case, this is insubstantial at best and actively pernicious at worst). Now with Madrid’s City Council currently under the administration of the Popular Party, the other proposed renamings are not likely to occur, following an announcement in May of this year.
Both bureaucracy and political sympathy are proving infuriating hurdles in the effort for Spain to heal itself and for the victims of decades of terror and repression to finally be given the justice they deserve — even if symbolic, in this instance of street names.
Further, concerning the Blue Division, its memory poses not just a problem in terms of symbol, but of vitriolic, antisemitic spectacle. Three months before the announcement by the PP, there occurred a commemoration ceremony at the largest cemetery in Madrid, with near 300 turning up to wave Francoist flags and salute with raised right arms in honour of the fallen Blue Division soldiers from the Battle of Krasny Bor against the Soviet Union 78 years ago, with civil war-era chants of ‘¡Arriva, España!’ Recordings of antisemitic hate speech spread across social media, with one instance capturing a young woman declaring passionately, ‘[T]he Jew is to blame, and the Blue Division fought for this.’
The continued, extensive existence of language and divisions that formed the crux of the Nationalists’ ideology in the civil war and repression that followed brings in to question the effectiveness of the Historical Memory Law. The significant amount of opposition to Franco’s exhumation is evidence of continued Francoist sympathy — or also coupled with indifference, another danger — as is a 2006 poll that showed a third of Spaniards considered the Nationalist coup legitimate in its mission (‘crusade,’ ‘Reconquista’) to overthrow the Second Spanish Republic, including 50 per cent of PP voters.
However, also included in the new draft law of 2020 is the determination to criminalise any open support of Francoism, including fines of €150,000, a considerable effort and at odds with the preference of forgetting just years earlier (though one considers how effectively this will be implemented when considering the semantic struggles mentioned above). In effect, this would ban organisations such as the FNFF and the far-right Vox party, which has only been gaining in support, and hate gatherings such as the one this February. Further, this law explicitly extends into the dictatorship, with school curricula to be updated to go beyond the minimal amount taught to the current adult population of Spain — an educational blind spot present throughout Western Europe, it seems, which must be down to the legacies of the Second World War and the Cold War. At the time of writing, the proposed law is being voted on in the Cortes. However, both the FNFF and Vox have opposed it — as have the Popular Party, claiming it will only ‘dig up grudges,’ another typical response in preserving the status quo — and concerns over the state’s control of free speech will be raised. Time will tell whether the PP’s and Vox’s 88 and 52 seats, respectively, will have significant influence in the parliamentary vote.
Despite this, activist and president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) — established in December 2000, and since has been instrumental in carrying out excavation work around the ‘white terror’ — Emilio Silva considers the new draft legislation to be ‘friendly towards the Francoists’ because it is not concerned with prosecuting those responsible for the crimes of the civil war or repression, thus not overturning the 1977 Amnesty Law that prohibited the retrospective prosecution of such criminals, a decision that benefitted the Nationalists far more than the Republicans and other left-wing groups.
All of this puts into focus how much exhaustive work needs to be carried out, and laws passed, for such sociopolitical divisions in Spain to be properly dealt with (what’s the alternative?) for it to no longer be the case that ‘[w]hen two Spaniards meet, they will know within 10 or 20 minutes which side their families were on [in the civil war],’ according to journalist José Martínez-Soler, who was tortured by the police shortly after Franco’s death. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that such efforts, though late and symbolic in several instances, are still necessary, with Secretary of State for Democratic Memory stating, ‘You could say it’s all a bit late, but it has to be done.’ It is nonetheless clear that more should and needs be done, that more would be satisfied if the law extended to those who carried out the atrocities, not only its victims: ‘A proper memory law should upset the executioners,’ Silva states. Again, this represents the less extensive ‘defrancoisation’ of Spain in comparison to the denazification of Germany.
Martínez-Soler’s pertinent reminder that ‘1939 marked Franco’s victory — it wasn’t the start of the peace’ unarguably epitomises the enduring Francoist sympathy seen well into the twenty-first century, several decades after his death, as well as the inadequate bureaucratic processing and unnecessarily complicated legal proceedings of recent years. (Though the Democratic Memory Law would entirely overcome this barrier by wiping out all criminal convictions of individuals under the regime owing their political, gender, and sexual identifications.)
This period marks an interesting point, with it being both considerably more recent in memory than other fascist dictators but distant enough that just over half of Spain’s population were born after 1975 — though, as is evident, the absence of Franco by no means suggests the absence of Francoism.
One hopes, however, that, if the law passes, including actively anti-Francoist education — alongside the retroactive repeal of people’s criminal statuses and hopeful closure for families of loved ones still to be located and exhumed from unmarked mass graves, which is considered to be over 100,000 — it is able to go a considerable way in dispelling the myths of, and finally considering the trauma around, the civil war and the dictatorship. Not to be minimised by proposed government legislation are the continued, honourable efforts of activists and academics who are working with such recent and volatile history — often concerning people largely overlooked in the historiography and thus the wider international community — in the pursuit of justice and truth, efforts that are only now beginning to drive out the manufactured shadows that have pervaded mind and space during decades of censorship and repression and the lingering, unshakeable Western sympathy during the Cold War. Perhaps finally these efforts may begin to heal a population that has been violently torn apart, both during its ‘holocaust’ and the strained, recent memory of it, and allow the nation and beyond to be exposed to, in the harsh light of day, Spain’s darkest period in living memory.
Jesús Ropero, great-nephew to a political prisoner who was shot in 1940, says, at the Guadalajara cemetery he has arrived at hoping by chance to locate his relative’s remains at an ARMH excavation, ‘People feel better when they know the history and have their relatives back. I think that heals wounds.’
For frequent and thorough updates on Spain’s memory wars, I’d really recommend @SpainMemoryWars on Twitter.
An Update on the Democratic Memory Law (23 November 2021)
‘This is, without a doubt, the last opportunity for our country after so many years.’ ‘Death extinguishes criminal responsibility.’ These two lines, spoken by Enrique Santiago, a deputy in parliament for Unidas Podemos of the coalition government, seem to typify contemporary legislative action in Spain. Too late, not enough, but is something.
Increasingly this ‘not enough’ is thankfully being challenged, such as this recent amendment to the 2020 Democratic Memory Law. In direct opposition to the 1977 Amnesty Law, this new amendment seeks to prosecute crimes during Francoist Spain (1939–75), no longer effectively pardoning such atrocities. Considering Santiago’s second line, however, a degree of defeatism lingers, that although the dictatorship was only a couple of generations ago, its staggering duration means that many who could be prosecuted are now dead. (In known, marked graves…)
An example of a Franco-era criminal is, of course, a former police officer, Antonio González Pacheco, known as ‘Billy the Kid’ for his chauvinistic habit of spinning his gun on his finger. In 2013, an international arrest warrant from Argentina was issued for him — because it couldn’t be in Spain because of the amnesty law, causing frustration and anguish for the relatives of victims trying to seek prosecution, but also because a judge in Buenos Aires had started investigating Franco-era crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction. The warrant was for 13 counts of torture when González Pacheco was working for the Francoist State. (Between 1972 and 1982, he was awarded four state medals, honours that allowed his pensions to surge 50%. Those who are awarded the medals are expected to exhibit ‘patriotism, loyalty and [the] will to serve,’ so one can only assume such qualities are required to be considered for the awards in the first place. That certainly seems consistent with this regime.) Statements from plaintiffs revealed distressing physical abuses of power, with one terrified for their life, and forcing their heads under water. This case would be an example of a Franco-era crime that could be prosecuted, giving justice to survivors… But again, Santiago’s second line strikes again, with González Pacheco having died from COVID-19 in May of 2020. He never stood trial.
With the forgiveness of the Amnesty Law finally being annulled by this new amendment, this suggests that such Franco-era crimes will be pursued, providing relatives of victims and survivors with recognition and justice, because this sincerely is the ‘last opportunity’ for Spain. (But again, this only concerns criminals who are still alive, a fact obvious to shrink as time goes on.)
What’s more, this all depends on whether the bill passes, with it ‘proving more difficult than expected’ because the coalition government lacks a majority in the lower parliamentary house (Congress of Deputies). This means the government are relying on sufficient support from the pro-independent, nationalist parties Republican Left of Catalonia and Basque Nationalist Party. Time will tell. What a state to be in…
To finish with Santiago once again, he has admitted that ‘there will be no major concrete legal consequences, but there will be a reparatory and moral effect for the families of the victims.’ To think that this is where Spain has ended up, that more couldn’t have been done — not to invalidate the genuine sense of recognition and justice this progress will hopefully provide — one pauses and thinks again, and considers the shadows of Francoism and how deeply they have spread into the life of the nation.
An Update on the Democratic Memory Law (28 June 2022)
At the time of writing, the Spanish coalition government has now gained the support from various nationalist parties required for the democratic memory bill to be passed. (Though there will remain consistent and considerable opposition from the right, as has been discussed above.) Franco’s fascist regime will then officially be declared ‘illegal and illegitimate,’ with greater funding from the government being directed towards the ongoing exhumations across the country.
As part, a commission headed by academics is to be set up to investigate human rights abuses during Franco’s dictatorship, which will go towards officially recognising the victims of the decades-long terror and repression.
As well as being many decades late and evidently difficult to pass — when it should be the opposite — the law has rightly been criticised for other reasons too. The ARMH has stated that the law ‘consolidates the existence’ of a hierarchy of victims: the victims of Francoism still being considered secondary, lesser. They also criticise the law for not holding to account the Catholic Church in its central and brutal involvement in the Franco regime. This is also seen in that the word ‘executioner’ does not appear anywhere in the bill, showing the state’s refusal to hold to account those responsible. There is also no mention of reparations, the ARMH points out.
An Update on the Democratic Memory Law (14 July 2022)
At the time of writing, on a hot and still Thursday in the early evening, the Democratic Memory Law — first proposed in September 2020 — has passed through Spain’s lower house of parliament. It was close: 166 for and 153 against (with 14 abstentions). It will now go to the Senate, the upper parliamentary house, where, if also approved, it will become law.
I want to be hopeful, it’s the right — and necessary — step to bring justice to the victims and survivors of Spain’s brutal civil war and fascist dictatorship, as well as to their families, friends, and loved ones, whose grief and anger have known no silence or respite. Which reminds me of the line from Enrique Santiago quoted above: ‘there will be a reparatory and moral effect for the families of the victims.’ But how did that sentence begin? ‘[T]here will be no major concrete legal consequences.’ The law, as stressed so much throughout this blog post, is sadly too little, too late. The ARMH have said, following the law’s passing through Congress, the lower house in Spain’s parliament:
1-.The criminals of the dictatorship will not be judged. [And we’re reminded of ‘Billy the Kid,’ discussed above in the November 2021 update.]
2-.The families of the disappeared will not be compensated.
3-.There will be a census of victims but not of executioners.
End of quote.
How much will really change? Though it’s better than the alternative: not being proposed or passed at all, or repealed — as Spain’s conservative Popular Party has said they will do if they come into power. Though the bill could have been proposed earlier too, much earlier (though it’s unlikely it would have been… which proves my point) and could be so much more comprehensive and reparative, for which the ARMH have rightly criticised it. The dark shadows of Spain’s recent past continue to loom large.
An Update on the Democratic Memory Law (6 October 2022)
128 in favour, 113 against (and 18 abstentions): it was close, but as of yesterday afternoon, after over five hours of debate, the Democratic Memory Law finally passed through the Senate, Spain’s upper parliamentary house.
My thoughts on the legislation — for what they’re worth — have been expressed enough throughout the writing of this blog post over the last twelve months, but as glad as we should be that some government action has been taken, just as those in 2007 were, we should not stop from demanding more and continuing to criticise, just as the ARMH are doing.
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