Forty-three years after Francisco Franco’s death, Spain may have finally come to grips with a task that it has found so hard to complete – laying to rest the ghost of the dictator. On August 24, Pedro Sanchez’s ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) passed an executive decree that will enable the exhumation of Franco’s remains from inside the tomb where he now lies. The tomb is housed inside the Basilica de la Santa Cruz which stands in the monumental memorial complex in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, not far from Madrid, dedicated to those who died in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).
Appropriately called the ‘Valley of the Fallen’, the monument is spread over a staggering 3,360 acres, or 13.6 square kilometres, of Mediterranean woodland and granite boulders on the Sierra de Guadarrama hills, about 50 kilometres north-west of Madrid, with Mount Abantos standing guard over it. What is not quite appropriate about the memorial, however, is the manner in which it was conceptualised and created. It looks as though the PSOE is about to set all that right – at last.
As incredible as it may sound today, the Valley of the Fallen – Spain’s most significant memorial to the Civil War – was commissioned by the very man who had lit the fuse of that war. After his bloody three-year campaign against the democratically-elected Republican government ended in Franco’s installation as Spain’s El Caudillo, the Leader, the general embarked on the grandiose project of erecting a monument that was to be “a national act of atonement and reconciliation”. The dictator wanted the memorial to be built on a scale that would equal “the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and memory”. It was indeed a gargantuan project, taking nearly 19 years (1940-1959) to execute and costing nearly 1200 million pesetas.
The centre piece is a gigantic 500-feet-tall cross – the tallest memorial cross in the world – that stands over a massive granite outcrop out of which was hewn an enormous basilica, the Basilica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caidos, effectively the largest Christian temple in the world, larger than even the venerated St Peter’s in Rome. The cross can be seen from over 30 kilometres away. One needs to ride a funicular to be able to reach the base of the cross itself.
Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), viewed from the esplanade. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In the valley, and scattered across its expanse, lie buried over 40,000 of the Civil War dead – both Nationalists and Republicans. A Benedictine abbey that houses the priests who say mass for the repose of the dead also stands inside the memorial complex, on the far side of the hill that makes up the basilica. And behind the main altar of the basilica, inside its central nave, lies Francisco Franco in one of the only two marked graves in the entire complex. The other grave, also lying inside the nave, belongs to Primo de Rivera, the notorious founder of the Falangist movement, who was executed for treason against the Republic in 1936 and whose remains Franco got interred here out of gratitude to his benefactor. Franco happens to be the only person buried in the Valley of the Fallen who did not die in the war that he had ignited. His acolytes thought up the specious justification that the Catholic faith allows the sponsor of a church to be buried within that church’s precinct. They were not bothered to explain why all the war’s fallen lay in unmarked graves, although the memorial has records relating to each of those buried there.
The most scandalous aspect of this surreal enterprise was that a very large number of Republican Army war prisoners – the government puts their number at no more than 2,700 while others estimate it to be around 20,000 – were made to work on the construction of this humongous project, though Spanish law prohibited forced labour. Those who died in harness here did not, however, find their final resting place inside the complex.
For many in Spain, the lumping together in a single memorial of the victims and the victimisers is completely unacceptable, if not downright outrageous. On top of that, the fact that the Civil War’s executioner-in-chief and his chief ideologue lay in state here while numerous patriotic, law-abiding Spaniards – whose only fault was their unwillingness to kowtow to an evil regime – lie inside cold, anonymous pits, makes the Valley of the Fallen a monstrous anachronism to many. Most liberals, and all those whose hearts beat in sympathy with the ideals of the failed Republican enterprise – including many whose kith and kin lie buried here – have scrupulously kept their distance from this strange memorial. When I happened to travel extensively around Spain in November-December 2013, I tried to look up nearly every possible monument that linked back to the Civil War, but felt no enthusiasm for this bizarre memorial.
Precisely for the same reasons that many abhor this monument, however, some others have adored it over the years. Every year till 2006, on November 20, the anniversary of Franco’s death, Spanish fascists, neo-Nazis and dyed-in-the-wool Roman Catholic conservatives congregated at the Valley in strength in celebration of their ‘dear departed leader’. And, come rain or shine, Franco’s grave is known to have been adorned with freshly-cut flowers every day of the year. So, while in Germany it was a crime to venerate Hitler and Nazism, Francisco Franco continued to have the best of all possible worlds well after his death.
Flowers lie on the tomb of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco at El Valle de los Caidos (The Valley of the Fallen). Credit: Reuters
The reasons are not far to seek. Germany ruptured with its Nazi past violently, irrevocably (as, at any rate, it looked then), in 1945. But in Spain, Franco was succeeded by King Juan Carlos, who had once memorably described the tyrant as “that exceptional man whom Spain has been immensely fortunate to have”. The young king openly acknowledged that his own political legitimacy was based on the Civil War victory that cost “so much sad but necessary sacrifice and suffering”. So Spain’s transition to democracy was necessarily a halting, wobbly process, and the fact that both the army and the church remained deeply entrenched in the country’s every power structure, the change in the regime notwithstanding, handicapped the process of democratic transformation even further. Then, the Western powers led by the US were also keen that the new Spain did not stray from the path of a conservative constitutional monarchy and that ‘radicals’ (meaning socialists) always remained a relatively weak political formation. Indeed, all through the Cold War years, Francoist Spain had remained a valuable ally of the great Western democracies.
But however hard one might try, the repressive nature of the Franco regime could never be wished away. All dissidence was treated as criminal activity and ruthless suppression of political resisters, and even their summary executions, continued till 1975, the year Franco died. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards had lost their lives during the Civil War years as well as subsequently, during the Franco years, and nearly half a million had fled the country to escape persecution. These wounds all remained open, and Spain’s unique – many believe deeply-flawed – approach to the democratisation of its polity and society was the Pacto del Olvido (the Pact of Forgetting), a social-political contract that resolved to put the country’s past firmly behind – effectively saying, “Let us all forget and forgive”.
This compact to collectively not look back to the country’s recent violent past was made into the Amnesty Law of 1977, and while, for the time, nearly every side agreed to go along with it, the law soon began to be questioned on grounds of legitimacy. Clearly, the Amnesty was loaded in favour of the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of the state’s crimes, and the victims – or their friends and families – could scarcely reconcile to such a law for any length of time. Angry debates raged through the 1980s/1990s over how and when to junk the Olvido, clearly no longer in favour with many Spaniards.
The socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, elected into office in 2004, challenged the continuing validity of the Amnesty Law. While it failed to scrap the law, it passed fairly comprehensive modifications to the Amnesty provisions by bringing in the Ley de Memoria Historica (the Historical Memory Law) of October 31, 2007. Among other things, the new law gave sanction to recognising the victims on both sides of the Civil War, accorded aid rights to victims (and their descendants) of the war as well as the subsequent dictatorship, and formally – for the first time – condemned the Franco regime for its many atrocities. Equally importantly, it decreed the removal of all Francoist symbols, memorials and statues from public places, and banned all political events at the Valley of the Fallen.
From 2007, it was no longer possible for Franco’s admirers to pay homage to his memory at the Valley memorial. (Franco, though, continued to lie inside Spain’s most important Civil War memorial.) The Historical Memory Law was a bitterly contested piece of legislation, but even the conservative People’s Party (PP) of Mariano Rajoy, which succeeded Zapatero’s socialist government in 2011 and is intrinsically hostile to the reform, did not dare repeal or even amend it, though Rajoy cut back on state aid to victims’ families in significant measure.
Then in June this year, the tables were turned on the PP government which had to resign following massive corruption allegations and Pedro Sanchez’s PSOE government was installed in its place. One of Sanchez’s election promises was to disinter Franco from the Valley of the Fallen by suitably modifying the Historical Memory Law. He delivered on that promise now by approving the legislative decree that will enable the exhumation without running the risk of a legal challenge. The decree will of course need to pass the parliament, but the government has enough support to garner the required number. Sanchez has managed to overcome another potential hurdle to his proposal also. Since Franco’s grave lies inside the basilica, the exhumation requires the Catholic Church’s consent as well. The fact that the Church has given that consent already shows how well the PSOE has done its spadework this time.
“Democracy”, the Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, commenting on the decree they just approved, said, “is not compatible with a tomb that honours the memory of Franco”. She is right, and, with Franco finally banished from the scene, the Valley of the Fallen can one day become Spain’s great Civil War museum.
Based out of Bangalore, Anjan Basu is a literary critic, commentator and translator. As Day is Breaking is his book of translations from the work of the well-known Bengali poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.