In conclusion, since 1975, Spanish citizens have maintained a predominantly negative view of Franco and his regime, albeit with many nuances and significant divisions of opinion. This sociological reality has combined with a high degree of forgetfulness, silence or ignorance about him that cannot be explained in logical terms, not least because a large part of the Spanish population was born, grew up, lived and (in some cases) suffered during the dictatorship of the Caudillo. If that direct personal experience was insufficient for those who had personal memories of the period, in addition there was and still is a diverse range of biographical studies on Franco, his regime and historical era. This literature has always been available to refresh the people’s memory and to inform the ideas and knowledge of those who were then too young or were born after his death. As an analyst of the phenomenon recently recalled:
Spanish society of the post-Franco era, in contrast to what has been said, did not want to forget but to know more of its own past, in particular about the Republic, the war and the dictatorship. It wanted to leave behind the lens of the dictatorship of imposing a single truth, which suppressed dissenting voices and debate in the public sphere.16
This paradox been explained as a peculiar amnesia or as evidence of a self-imposed silence and self-induced forgetfulness that became a key element of the political culture of the new Spanish democracy. The tacit political agreement, sealed during the transition, avoided mentioning in public or using as a political weapon the memory of crimes committed by both sides during the Civil War and the Francoist repression following the victory, in order to avoid the risk of destabilizing the new democratic regime. An upset of the balance might have been triggered by demands for people to be held responsible for past actions and the settling of old scores. In short, it is obvious that the long shadow of blood cast by the Civil War of 1936–9 and the general will of the people not to repeat this traumatic experience under any circumstances (‘never again a civil war’ was a general code of conduct) promoted the badly named ‘pact of forgetfulness’ about a past and a person so recent as to be uncomfortable and disturbing (however well-known and remembered sotto voce). The sociologist Karl Mannheim had already warned long before: ‘If society wants to continue to exist, the social memory is as important as the oblivion.’ The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, agreed without reservation: ‘The knowledge of the past is only desirable if it is useful for the future and the present, not if it weakens the present or destroys a vital future.’17
In the recent case of Spain, the double political amnesty of the years 1976 (the legislative decree of 30 July) and 1977 (the law of 15 October) demanded, as a necessary and lesser evil, a tacit collective and selective historical amnesia that persisted for a long time before it became increasingly invalid and inoperable. The common etymological root of both ‘amnesty’ and ‘amnesia’ was acknowledged in the 1976 decree approved by the first government of Adolfo Suárez, in its supporting preamble: ‘As Spain moves towards full democratic normality, the moment has arrived to finalize this process with the forgetting of any discriminatory legacy from the past that could affect the full fraternal coexistence of Spaniards.’18 The urgent practical need to draw a discreet public veil over that traumatic past was recognized by El País, the spokesman of the anti-Franco democratic opposition, in an editorial of 17 July 1977 commemorating the anniversary of the start of the Civil War: ‘It is difficult to forge an accord on the memory of the bloodshed amongst brothers.’19 The same influential newspaper would reiterate the imperative for the adoption of the amnesty law in October 1977:
Democratic Spain should, from now on, look forwards, forget the responsibilities and the deeds of the Civil War, leave aside the 40 years of dictatorship […]. A people neither can nor should lack historical memory, but this must serve to nourish peaceful coexistence for the future and not to nurture resentment from the past.20
With democracy already consolidated, there were various important recognitions of the existence of this singular ‘pact of forgetfulness’, as the initial caution which had driven its existence ceased to function as a new generation of Spanish society were born and grew up. One of the most notorious comments was made during the bitter election campaign of May 1993, when the leader of the right-wing opposition, José María Aznar, criticized Felipe González, the head of the socialist government, and ‘accused him of repeatedly violating the pact sealed during the transition not to stir up the past’. Nearly a decade later, in 2001, with Aznar already in power, the new socialist leader, Rodríguez Zapatero, corroborated the existence of a ‘tacit pact of silence’ whose hours were numbered, in his view: ‘The transition drew a veil over the collective memory to achieve reconciliation.’21 To search for the origins of this equivocal ‘pact of forgetfulness’ merely in the political cautiousness of the defeated left-wing (or in its fear of ‘settling old accounts’ due to the sheer force of the tacit powers of Francoism) could perhaps be overly simplistic.22 Another explanation could be offered for the enduring explicit or tacit agreement during recent decades: the ideological and historical anachronism of the extreme alternatives faced during the Civil War and the inability of Spanish citizens to identify with any of them personally, totally and exclusively. The writer Francisco Ayala, a lucid witness of that time who spent many years in exile, wrote on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the conflict:
The decision to cover the Civil War in silence was not, therefore, only due to an act of political prudence, but had been imposed by a basic reality: nobody felt solidarity with the ideological positions that had been in play during that war.23
It is probably the historian Santos Juliá who has followed this line of reasoning with the greatest emphasis and clarity. In his view, an examination of the complex relationship between remembrance and oblivion of the Civil War and the Franco regime in Spain has to begin with the fact that the second was a result of the first and that this, regardless of its causes and respective responsibilities, resulted in a brutal harvest of blood with no fewer than 90,000 Republican casualties (perhaps another 40,000 in the postwar period) and up to 55,000 Francoist deaths (caused only during the war).24 The overwhelming awareness of these abominable crimes created the context for the peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain through a cultural formula well known in many countries and in many similar transitional processes: to ‘cast into oblivion’ the traumatic and divisive past (as a case of oblivione mandare, oblivion act, d’en renouveler la mémoire). That formula involved a voluntary political and civic will to remain silent on (that is, not to mention or use publicly as a weapon) something that would prevent progress and could block or hamper the continued peaceful existence of a political community.25 The result of this political choice, progressively developed between both the elites and the citizenship, was in tune with the new perception of the Civil War during the 1960s – that it was no longer the heroic and laudable myth (an anti-fascist or anti-Communist crusade) but a new tragic and deplorable myth (a criminal and shameful fratricidal war). In the words of Juliá:
The question, therefore, is not that nothing has been spoken of (the war and the dictatorship), but what has been said and with what intention; not that the facts are ignored, but that their meaning has undergone changes imposed over the years. It forms part of the Civil War that each side treats the other as criminal, assassin and saboteur, as Carl Schmitt wrote in his article of 1947. But this representation of the other side as a killer that must be exterminated, which was overwhelming in the years of war on both sides and persisted among the Francoist circles of power until the end, increasingly gave way, first among the exiles, then among dissident groups of the dictatorship, to a representation of that past as a fratricidal war: the other was no longer a criminal or a murderer but a brother. It is not that the war was not to be written about or that it was left to fall into oblivion, but in political speeches, reports, opposition parties and group resolutions and mani
festos, its meaning was transformed with the accumulation of new experiences and the pursuit of other political goals. The exaltation of their own cause, even among those who had fought in the trenches, gave way to a representation of the war as a collective tragedy. This gave rise to a sense of shared responsibility and the demands for an amnesty as a first step to start a constitutional process that would culminate in a new regime fully accepted by the majority of Spaniards, whichever side they had fought for during the war.26
In short, the so-called tacit ‘pact of forgetfulness’ (in essence the agreement not to use the war and its crimes as an active political weapon) made possible the peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. But it also involved the progressive elimination of any public disruptive and vindictive reference to ‘the former head of state’ in order not to hamper that transition and further democratic consolidation. It should be noted that the process started just as Franco’s body was buried in the retrochoir of the Basilica of the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) on 23 November 1975. A day earlier, on his proclamation as king of Spain, Don Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón had set the tone when referring to his predecessor in a neutral and generic style: ‘The name of Francisco Franco is already a milestone in Spanish events, to which it will be impossible not to refer in order to understand our contemporary political life.’27
The consequent elimination of the public vestiges of Franco and his regime from 1975 was as slow and necessarily complex as the transitional process and the corresponding democratic consolidation, although it did not raise major public controversies or notable political or parliamentary clashes. Perhaps a paradigmatic example of this gradual disappearance by ‘consensus’ is the fate of the imposing equestrian statue of Franco which looked over the parade ground of the castle of Montjuïc in Barcelona. One day in May 1986, close to the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the horse and its illustrious rider were dismantled and moved, stealthily and without witnesses, to the library of the military museum in the interior of the castle itself (and later, in 2008, it was placed in a municipal warehouse closed to the public). A similar fate awaited another equestrian statue of the Caudillo which presided over Valencia’s main square. After successive delays in the execution of a plan agreed by the city council of March 1979, in September 1983 the statue was dismantled with little incident and withdrawn to the interior of the Capitanía General (General Headquarters) de la Región Militar de Levante, in Valencia, where it still remains.28
But if the fate of the equestrian statues of Franco in Barcelona and Valencia denote a form of discreet removal of the Caudillo to the annals of history or the barracks of his comrades in arms, the destiny of the equestrian statue in his home town of El Ferrol exemplifies the problematic boundaries of this process of public and official elimination. Cast in bronze in 1967 in the shipyards of Empresa Nacional Bazán, this statue probably weighed more than 6 tons. Although the anti-Franco left won the municipal elections in the city, and even though there had been multiple demonstrations against the statue’s presence (including two unsuccessful bombings), it continued undaunted in its location in the Plaza de España until well into 2002, when it was withdrawn to the Naval Museum (before moving in 2010 to a closed store at the Naval School). It is possible that no one had dared to remove it previously because, as acknowledged by the city’s mayor, who was from a left-wing Galician nationalist party, it ‘weighed a lot’. It could also have been influenced by a survey by the newspaper La Voz de Galicia of the inhabitants of the city in the autumn of 2000 which revealed a significant sociological reality: ‘46 per cent of those polled supported the elimination of such an uncomfortable relic, one the town hall did not even include in its guidebooks, but 40 per cent were against disturbing their equestrian countryman.’29
Nor was the equestrian statue of Franco in Madrid, located in the Plaza de San Juan de la Cruz (next to the Nuevos Ministerios) since 1956, immediately dismantled and removed. It remained at its post until the morning of 17 March 2005, when it was taken to a ministerial warehouse amidst a small flurry of nostalgia for the old regime. It was not the only physical memory of the Caudillo in the capital and province of Madrid. There was still a street, a square (in El Pardo, near the neo-classical palace which had been his official residence for 35 years) and a triumphal arch (in Moncloa, at the beginning of the Ciudad Universitaria and the exit to the road to La Coruña).30 This was in contrast to the few honours in the capital to other heads of state such as Niceto Alcalá-Zamora Torres or Manuel Azaña Díaz, to name only his immediate predecessors between 1931 and 1936 (although there are more monuments to Alfonso XIII and Alfonso XII). In fact, one prominent analyst has recently drawn attention to the glaring imbalance in street names in Madrid when it comes to honouring the memory of general combatants on the side of Franco and those of the Republican government, for example:
If Aranda, Asensio Cabanillas, Fanjul, García Escámez, García Morato, Captain Haya, Millán Astray, Mola, Moscardó, Orgaz, Saliquet, Varela or Yagüe have their corresponding street in the capital of Spain, why not Aranguren, Asensio Torrado, Batet, Ciutat, Cordón, Escobar, Hernández Sarabia, Hidalgo de Cisneros, Lister, Miaja, Mera, Pozas, Rojo, Riquelme or Tagüeña? An unforgivable oversight, a definitive omission, perhaps?31
Perhaps only the city of Santander exceeded that of Madrid in this overabundance of Francoist symbols in the streets and in urban public monuments. According to a study conducted at the beginning of 2001, the Cantabrian capital had no fewer than 30 streets dedicated to personalities of the dictatorship (including José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, his sister Pilar, the lifetime national delegate of the female section) and another 12 statues and monuments relating to the regime (including an equestrian statue of the Caudillo, one of three by the sculptor José Capuz). But here also the effects of the Law of Historical Memory were inescapable: in December 2008 the statue was removed from its pedestal in the centre of the city and transferred to a municipal warehouse.32
In short, in the form of public statues, names of avenues, squares and streets, in plaques or commemorative monoliths of his birth, his death, his visits or his political work, the name of Franco continued to be a tangible and recurrent presence in Spanish society for a long time (and there are still some minor tributes scattered around). However, knowledge of his historical role is somewhat diffused and scant among the citizenship, in particular among the younger echelons, who are increasingly prevalent in the population pyramid. As Santos Juliá recalled in 2002:
Spaniards have an ambiguous assessment of Franco, quite unlike the Germans’ demonization of Hitler. Perhaps it is because the majority of adults did not know the worst years, the 1930s and 1940s, but rather knew the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. They recall that in the second half of Francoism although there was a lack of freedom there was also an improvement in the material quality of life.33
Thus, today, Franco represents the name of a spectre from the past, uncomfortable but very real and significant. A considerable part of today’s political culture may have its genesis and its origins, for better or worse, in the times he presided over and moulded, and this may have given rise to, among other aspects of political life: the obsession with unanimity in political decisions, the tendency to demonize conflict and differences, the inclination to identify government with nation, the massive growth of the executive against other state powers, the liking for charismatic leadership, the complacency towards corruption and venality, etc.34 A humorous vignette by cartoonist Max in El País on 28 March 2015 epitomized this with a succinct dialogue between a young man and a know-it-all. The first asks: ‘Master, what remains of Francoism?’ The second responds: ‘Do you see this sprinkling of grey dust everywhere? It’s dandruff and it is an attitude.’ A similar explanation was offered that same year by the historian Julián Casanova: ‘Such a prolonged authoritarian rule had profound effects on political structures, civil society, individual values and the behaviour of differen
t social groups.’35
Perhaps the most common attitude of Spaniards to Franco and Francoism is that subtle indifference that conceals and eclipses the majority of negative feelings aroused by his personality and undemocratic and reactionary politics. This is borne out by the strange statement made in November 2000 by the mayor of Ávila, of the right-wing Popular Party, to justify his refusal to meet the opposition demands that he change the name of the street dedicated to General Franco and remove its corresponding plaque and effigy: ‘One has to accept history with all its consequences. […] It does not disturb me to see the squares referencing such dreadful characters from our history. Nor does it bother the people.’36 As announced on the cover of the influential British magazine, The Economist, in its issue of 25 November 2000, Spain had passed in the last quarter of a century ‘From Franco to Frantic’, at least until the economic crisis of 2011 temporarily called a halt to that process.
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