Bye Bye Monuments to Franco in Spain
Madrid Spain - Last month Spain passed a law that doesn’t make much sense, on its face, but says quite a lot about Europe in the new century. The Parliament, fulfilling a campaign promise from 2004 by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s or who suffered as a political consequence of General Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime should get full cooperation from the state, and at the same time that every province in the country must remove remaining monuments to Franco.
Unearth the past — and erase it. Never mind that over the years most of these monuments have already been carted off, making the law largely toothless and symbolic. Even so, in the debates over it, nobody here has talked much about the inherent contradiction.
Survivors build monuments to remember the dead, and tear down the statues of the tyrants who killed them, but mostly in vain. Statues and memorials inscribe history, which each generation rewrites to suit itself. In Budapest statues of Communist idols have been relocated to a park on the city outskirts to become virtual headstones at a kind of kitsch graveyard. Russia, in its dash to prosperity, remains conspicuously reluctant to rehash the past, but it also removed many signs of Soviet rule.
And of course nobody has scrutinized public symbols and spaces more than the Germans, for whom nearly every stone and street sign has provoked a fresh monument. The meeting room for the German foreign minister in Berlin is an example of the extent to which the Germans have gone even in private. Originally the office for the head of the Nazi state bank, then taken over by Erich Honecker, the East German leader, who met in it with his Politburo, the room was left nearly intact after the Wall fell when the Foreign Ministry moved in, so that on where paintings of Marx and Engels once hung behind Honecker’s chair, faded rectangles were left as cautionary reminders.
Spain is different, though, having endured a civil war. With their traditional fear of deep, dark demons in their soul, Spaniards after Franco’s death and during the transition to democracy entered into what has long been called here a pact of silence, which the new law clearly aims to undo. As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper put it 40 years ago, about a different regime, “A single personal despot can prolong obsolete ideas beyond their natural term, but the change of generations must ultimately carry them away.” You might say that in Spain’s case the change now comes a generation late.
I recently drove the 45 minutes to revisit Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, Franco’s most megalomaniacal monument. The highway passed by bulls, those reared for bullfights, grazing in green fields, then abruptly rose into snow and gloom. During the 1950s thousands of prison laborers tunneled hundreds of yards into a solid granite mountain ridge to build one of the world’s biggest and most lugubrious basilicas and a Civil War memorial, beneath a cross nearly 50 stories high.
The site expressed Franco’s desire for national atonement. His rule, as Raymond Carr, a Franco historian, once wrote, was not really a victory of the Falange, the Spanish version of fascism, “but of Catholic, conservative Spain over the liberal Spain of the Second Republic.” And Franco, on his crusade to save Christian civilization, modeling himself after monarchs like Philip II, intended to echo the monastic austerity of Philip’s nearby Escorial.
The architecture brings Albert Speer more to mind. The remains of murdered Republicans were unearthed from mass graves and trucked to the valley to be mixed with dead Nationalists, so it could be designated a place for all civil war victims. Even today most Spaniards aren’t aware that Republicans are buried there along with Franco and the founder of the Falange Party, Franco’s onetime rival, José Antonio Primo de Rivera.
The site culminates at the high altar with the graves of those two men, a fresh bouquet of flowers laid on each tombstone. Four hundred thousand people a year are still said to visit the place. A young Spanish family meandered glumly through the cold and silence, gazing up at the glowering statues of soldiers and saints. On the slushy plaza outside, the view toward Madrid and the giant cross disappeared behind black clouds.
Long before the law was passed, nearly all Franco monuments were removed under socialist and conservative governments. But it was done quietly, without a public airing of the issues, as if the democracy were too fragile to bear the conversation, some say, although probably because Spaniards who had lived through the last Franco years had simply come to the conclusion that it was best and so wished to move on. This, however, still left a gap.
Even today you must comb through an English translation of a glossy guidebook to the Valle de los Caídos to find a passing remark about the prison laborers. In Madrid an avenue is still named Caudillo, after Franco, and another is named after the division of soldiers Franco sent to aid the Nazis. In Santander, although soon to be replaced by a parking garage on orders of the conservative local government, there’s a statue of Franco on horseback that can bring to mind the statues of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson in American Southern towns where mayors and police chiefs are now often black.
Mr. Zapatero’s conservative critics say he is using identity politics, akin to the moral values debate in America, to promote a social agenda that includes defending the rights of homosexuals, transsexuals, women and Catalans. The new monuments law adds another group to that list: dead Republicans, the civil war’s losers. But to the liberals of Mr. Zapatero’s generation it still doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Now even the monuments are being removed, “the final blow ” ; “The law of historical memory is anti-historical because it tries to erase the memory of Franco, and all the good that he did for Spain.” Prohibiting Francoists from gathering at the Valle de los Caídos will not change anything, he warned. “The place has always had a particular significance. You can never separate Franco from it.”
Legislating monuments doesn’t rectify injustices of the past, it just fumbles with the symbols of history, reminding us why we devise them in the first place. Ultimately monuments gain meaning when we imbue them with it, otherwise they join the statues of cruel monarchs and bloody generals that have become the civilized backdrop to our parks and plazas.
You might say Spain’s situation after Franco’s death was not unlike a marriage: each side holding in reserve those remarks that would do the other side most harm. Silence created a bond. It’s golden, as the saying goes; statues and plaques are just metal and stone. That said, the new law, forged by the children of this silence, paradoxically injects these rusting symbols with fresh significance for a new century.
By . . . Michael Kimmelman