Exhuming Franco

Spain's Second Transition

Sebastiaan Faber

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780826501745
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism. This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.

1

How Dead Is He?

“Our top story tonight: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” Chevy Chase deadpanned on December 13, 1975, in his Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. The show—then still NBC’s Saturday Night—had premiered only two months before and the Spanish dictator, who had ruled Spain since 1939, became a running gag throughout its first and second seasons. In fact, it seems that the Generalissimo was posthumously adopted as an honorary member of that year’s cast, alongside John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Dan Ackroyd. When producer Lorne Michaels published the first collection of the show’s gags and scripts, in 1977, it was Franco who appeared on the cover, in a colorized photograph, as “host.”

Three weeks earlier, on November 22, Chase had first informed his viewers of the death of the eighty-two-year-old Spanish head of state, whose failing health had been in the news for weeks. “Reactions from world leaders were varied,” Chase said. “Held in contempt as the last of the fascist dictators in the West by some, he was also eulogized by others, among them Richard Nixon, who said . . .”—at this point, the slide behind Chase switched to a photograph of Franco alongside Adolf Hitler, with the arm of the Spanish leader lifted in a Nazi salute—“Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness.” The ironic contrast between text and image perfectly captured Franco’s evolution from shadow member of the Axis before and during World War II to anti-Communist “sentinel of the West” in the years of the Cold War. “Despite Franco’s death and an expected burial tomorrow,” Chase concluded, “doctors say the dictator’s health has taken a turn for the worse.”

Forty-five years later, the SNL skit has lost little of its punch or, for that matter, relevance. Franco is still dead, of course; but he also continues to be held in contempt, to garner praise, and to dominate the headlines. Over the past forty-four years, the Spanish Far Right has openly celebrated his legacy on the anniversary of his passing, with Catholic masses in his honor, multitudinous meetings at the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid, and flag-waving gatherings at Franco’s grave. In 2002, the conservative government of Prime Minister José María Aznar caused a stir when it awarded a state subsidy to the Franco Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting the dictator’s legacy. In 2005, Far-Right groups protested the removal of an equestrian statue of the former head-of-state in Madrid that had been left untouched for decades. In 2015, the historian Ángel Viñas revealed that Franco, who cultivated a public image of modesty, moderation, and austerity, had taken shameless advantage of the civil war and his close to four decades of autocratic rule to enrich himself and his family to a perverse extent (Viñas 2015). Today, the Franco clan holds assets that some estimates put at $550 million (Torrús 2017).

If these incidents can be chalked up as relatively minor episodes, Franco’s ghost has at other moments shaken the very bedrock of the Spanish state. In 2008, the investigative judge Baltasar Garzón scandalized conservative public opinion and the judicial establishment when he formally requested the General’s death certificate as he prepared to investigate crimes against humanity committed under his rule. A bold, unprecedented attempt to implement international law on domestic soil, Garzón’s intervention, which had been prompted by victims of the dictatorship, also questioned the foundational principles and master narrative of Spain’s young democracy. But the system swiftly closed ranks and Garzón’s adventure would eventually result in his disbarment.

As we saw, in the summer of 2018, the Spanish government headed by the social democrat Pedro Sánchez decided it was time to remove the dictator from his all too conspicuous tomb. The exhumation, which attracted worldwide media attention, rekindled the debate about Franco’s legacies in present-day Spain. For some on the Right, moving Franco’s corpse was not only a scandalous affront to the dictator and his family, but unnecessary to boot. Spain, they argued, had fully settled its accounts with its conflictive past decades ago, when, shortly after Franco’s death, it became a full-fledged democracy. For others, the exhumation was the proper way to consummate the final break between democratic Spain and the dictatorship: the belated but much-needed last touch on a forty-five-year process of democratic transition. For yet others, it was a mere symbolic gesture that only confirmed how much remains to be done for Spain to truly come to terms with the legacies of its three-year civil war (1936–39) and thirty-six years of institutionalized state violence (1939–75).

For a former dictator, Franco enjoys an unusually revered status in democratic Spain. Unlike other twentieth-century tyrants, he died in bed, on November 20, 1975, almost forty years after his involvement, as a young military officer, in an attempted coup d’état that would unleash a bloody three-year civil war. That war was won by the self-identified “Nationalists,” under Franco’s leadership, with significant backing from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Franco was head of state from 1939 until his death. Starting in the 1950s, he enjoyed the support of the United States; in late 1955, Spain was admitted to the United Nations.

Small in stature and endowed with an unusually high-pitched voice, Franco ruled his country with an iron hand. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were forced into exile; tens of thousands of supporters of the Republic were executed, imprisoned, or interned in concentration camps. Public expressions of Catalan, Basque, and Galician language and culture were proscribed in the name of national unity, along with anything else that did not jibe with Franco’s image of Spanish identity and history, in which Catholicism and empire figured prominently. The public sphere was heavily censored. “Spain has seven enemies,” one of the lessons in an official elementary-school textbook read: “liberalism, democracy, Judaism, Freemasonry, Marxism, capitalism, and separatism.” Despite Franco’s avowed distaste for capitalism, in the 1950s and ’60s his regime modernized Spain’s economy, as industrialization and mass tourism pushed economic growth to record levels.

Once the old dictator was dead, Spain quickly became a democracy in a relatively peaceful—but by no means bloodless—transition that was long held up as an international model. The Franco regime and the democratic opposition were able to reach a compromise: political parties were legalized—even the Communists were allowed back in—while all politically motivated crimes committed in the preceding thirty-nine years were forgiven in a general amnesty. This meant not only that thousands of the regime’s political prisoners went free—a key priority for the opposition at the time—but also that every representative of the government, regardless of rank or rap sheet, got to start over with a clean slate.

In the absence of any kind of purge or accountability, existing power structures remained largely intact. Everyone could stay put, whether they were politicians, judges, mayors, television producers, chiefs of police, state functionaries, or university professors. The families, banks, and corporations that had thrived under the regime, accumulating power, prestige, and wealth, were allowed to keep their capital, land, and nobility titles. Even Franco’s handpicked successor, the thirty-seven-year-old Juan Carlos de Borbón, who was crowned days after the dictator’s death, simply remained on the throne.

The fact that the Amnesty Law would later bar the thousands of victims of the dictatorship from seeking justice was not on many Spaniards’ minds at the time. The majority of the population agreed with the political leadership that it was more important to look toward the future than to wallow in the past. For many, the fear of a new civil war—and the desire to avoid that scenario at all costs—was also front and center. The predominant sensations were relief or pride, if not indifference.

Yet over the past twenty years or so, a growing number of Spaniards have seen these feelings of relief, pride, and indifference turn into indignation. The Spanish transition began to look decidedly less exemplary in the 1990s, as countries like Chile, Argentina, and South Africa showed it was possible to process a violent past in different ways, through truth commissions—or even trials in which former military and political leaders ended up convicted. “Why has impunity reigned in our country?” younger generations began to wonder; “why haven’t we been able to come to terms with Francoism?”

After years of neglect, the thousands of unmarked mass graves from the civil war that continued to litter the country drew the attention of media and civil society as teams of volunteers engaged in improvised exhumation projects. Around the same time, younger progressives began to understand the country’s chronic problems, including political corruption and economic inequality, as symptoms of the improperly processed past. This trend intensified in the wake of the Great Recession. The indignados who, in the spring and summer of 2011, occupied public urban spaces for months on end and later organized themselves politically in parties like Podemos, waved the flag of the Second Republic (1931–39) and denounced what they now, disparagingly, called the “regime of 1978.” “They call it a democracy,” they chanted, “but that’s not what it is!”

In 2007, under the previous socialist government, the Spanish parliament adopted a law that included a set of cautious first steps to settle some of the accounts left unattended in 1978. The annual gathering to honor Franco at the Valley of Fallen, for example, was finally declared illegal, while state subsidies were made available for families who sought to exhume their loved ones from a mass grave. Still, for many critics the law was woefully insufficient. While attempts to bring judicial charges against regime officials ran up against the Amnesty Law, international pressure increased. In 2015, the United Nations’ human rights commission concluded that the Amnesty Law should be rescinded because it had become a serious impediment for investigations into human rights violations (Faber 2018, 86–87). UN spokespeople also noted that the Spanish government was failing to meet its obligations toward the many victims of torture and forced disappearance. To remedy these deficits, the UN has urged Spain to institute a truth commission.

So far, however, the government in Madrid has preferred to sidestep such recommendations. After all, the potential presence of Francoist legacies in Spain today is a politically sensitive matter. The escalation around Catalonia’s bid for independence has only served to increase the discomfort, as Spain’s handling of the Catalan crisis has sown doubts about the functioning of its rule of law and respect for constitutional liberties. Similar doubts had already emerged in 2015 when the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy passed a controversial “gag law” that, among other things, brandished the notion of “citizen safety” to limit the legal right to protest and impose hefty fines on journalists covering police malfeasance. According to the New York Times editorial board, the law “disturbingly harken[ed] back to the dark days of the Franco regime.”

The years following proved that the critics had been right to worry. Spanish citizens have been slapped with steep fines for protesting without permission, criticizing police, blocking an eviction, or offending the King. In 2017, a young woman was convicted to a year in prison for “extolling terrorism” after she’d tweeted an old joke about Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s second-in-command, who had been killed in a spectacular operation by ETA, in 1973—that is, during the dictatorship. (The Supreme Court later exonerated her.) In early October 2019, it was revealed that a woman who, the year before, had joined the activists of Femen in a topless protest against a neofascist tribute to Franco, and who’d been beaten and kicked by the neofascists, was fined 300 euros for “disturbing public safety” with “a nude upper body” and “slogans against the meeting.” As it happened, the tribute to Franco had been approved by the authorities, while Femen’s protest had not (Borraz 2019). In a similarly curious asymmetry, the Franco Foundation, which seeks to promote the dictator’s legacy, is perfectly legal in Spain, receiving subsidies from the state into the twenty-first century. To be sure, the Spanish legal code follows European trends in that it prohibits publicly extolling any group found guilty of genocide or crimes against humanity. The problem is that Francoism was never put on trial. (In late October 2018, the European Parliament passed a motion against the rise of neofascist violence in Europe that included several incidents in Spain. Among other things, the motion condemned the Franco Foundation as “an entity that glorifies a dictatorship and its crimes.”)

The regional “separatists” are not the only ones who believe that Franco’s ghost still wields power over Spain. In November 2019, one of the Catalan independence movement’s staunchest critics, the journalist Antonio Maestre, published Franquismo, S.A. (Francoism, Inc.), a book that reveals the extent to which the roots of today’s corporate and political corruption can be found in the close ties that the Franco regime established with the businessmen and bankers who supported the Nationalist coup. A sizeable part of Spain’s largest corporations and wealthiest families today, Maestre writes, “owe their prominent positions to their collaboration with the regime.” The benefits they received in exchange for their support ranged from nobility titles and profitable monopolies to the use of cheap labor from (political) prisoners. For these corporations and families—which included Catalans and Basques—the democratic transition was a mere blip on the screen: they were allowed “to continue to function normally.” Maestre draws a comparison with Germany, where companies that collaborated with the Nazi regime or profited from prison labor were eventually forced to pay reparations. In Spain, such a measure seems still far off. (See Chapter 11 for an interview with Maestre.)

Emilio Silva, too, believes that there is an endless laundry list of issues from the Civil War and the Franco period that are yet to be settled. “Franco’s body symbolizes an enormous democratic deficit,” Silva wrote in a column in late September 2019. Among the institutions that most benefited from the regime but have never been held accountable for it is the Catholic Church. The Spanish judiciary, too, is a relatively closed guild in which reactionaries find a comfortable home. Silva expressed skepticism about the significance of the dictator’s exhumation. For one, he pointed out, Franco’s new resting place is still a public cemetery, maintained, just like the Valley of the Fallen, by the taxpayers. “That’s a slap in the face of the regime’s victims,” he told me. “How can you make them to pay for his tomb?” In that sense, it would have been more fitting if, in October 2019, Franco’s mummy had slipped from its coffin and crashed to the ground; his victims, too, have had their bones and skulls exposed every time a mass grave is dug up. (See Chapter 16 for an interview with Silva.)

Now that the dictator’s tomb is empty, what will happen to the Valley? Whether it will become a “memorial for the fight against fascism,” as Prime Minister Sánchez suggested in 2018, remains to be seen. The idea to re-invent the Valley is not new; something similar had been suggested in 2011 by a blue-ribbon commission appointed by the previous Socialist government—although its report was then ignored through the seven years of conservative rule that followed it. “That Franco had to leave was obvious,” Francisco Ferrándiz, a social anthropologist who specializes in exhumations and who was a member of the commission, told me in October 2019. “But it’s not clear what possibilities for change the Valley offers. In 2011, I personally believed it could still be turned into a site of reconciliation. By now, I’ve changed my mind. The monument’s entire design is the expression of a totalitarian worldview. One option that might be feasible is to turn it into an educational space, following the example of the Nazi concentration camps.” (Some of the recommendations from 2011 were incorporated into the new Law of Democratic Memory proposed in September 2020.)

One of Ferrándiz’s fellow members on the commission, the Catalan historian Ricard Vinyes, believes that any attempt to turn the Valley into something else is futile—in part because the monument is in such bad shape. “The monument was born sickly. Today, it’s a dying body,” he wrote in a newspaper column in December 2019. To prevent its collapse, due in large part to ongoing water damage, would cost “extravagant” amounts of money. “Worse, such an investment will only postpone, not stop, its transformation into a ruin.” The question at hand, he wrote, “is not how to save the monument with pedagogical fantasies . . . that don’t transcend the museum,” but “how to accompany the ruin,” so that any visitor may “look and think, choose, interpellate, and perhaps construct an image or a decision about the past.” To be sure, schools should teach about the Valley, its history and its purpose. But the monument itself should exhibit “its ethical, political, and religious collapse” (Vinyes 2019). (See Chapter 15 for an interview with Vinyes.)

The Francoist monument is not the only structure in danger of collapse, the journalist Guillem Martínez warned in late September 2019. For all its progressive symbolism, he wrote, Franco’s exhumation was a distraction from the fact that Spain’s rule of law is rapidly eroding. “The state has taken an authoritarian turn,” Martínez argued. He was referring not only to the 2015 gag law but also to the changed role of the monarchy—which in 2017 adopted an unusually politicized stance toward Catalonia—and the way the judicialization of the Catalan conflict has served as an excuse for the authorities to undermine the right to protest under the banner of “security” or “national unity.” “Concepts like democracy, rebellion, sedition or terrorism only function if they are crystal clear,” Martínez wrote. “Instead, they are becoming more elastic by the day.” (See Chapter 4 for an interview with Martínez.)

The November 2019 elections provided an opportunity for all parties to use the controversy over Franco to their electoral advantage. While the Partido Popular (PP) accused Prime Minister Sánchez of opportunism, it did not hesitate for throw oil on the fire and resuscitate the specter of civil war. “Instead of working toward the unity of all Spaniards, Sánchez is trying to divide us. Because that’s the roadmap of the Left,” Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP’s president of the Madrid region, said in early October. “The targets of his attacks are clear: the Transition, the monarchy, the flag, and the Constitution.” The Socialists are homing in on Franco now, she said. What will be next? “The cross at the Valley of the Fallen? The entire Valley? Or will churches burn again, as they did in 1936?” (Caballero 2019). The debates preceding Sánchez’s investiture at the helm of a progressive coalition government in early January 2020 continued in the same vein, with several leaders quoting Manuel Azaña, Spain’s president in the years of the Second Republic (Pardo Torregrosa 2020). Javier Ortega Smith, a deputy for Vox, spent part of the debate ostentatiously reading from a recent book by Stanley Payne, a conservative US historian, entitled In Defense of Spain. “The Communists Who Provoked the Civil War Return to Government,” the right-wing media outlet Intereconomía tweeted in early January 2020.

Meanwhile, public opinion polls conducted around Franco’s exhumation confirmed that Spaniards were seriously divided—not only on the desirability of removing the dictator from his tomb but on the very nature of his regime. According to a poll by the newspaper ElDiario.es, almost three quarters of PP voters believed Franco’s body should have been left alone (Cortizo 2019). A poll by the television network LaSexta ...