“Those who are condemned to repeat the past are not those who do not remember it, but those who do not understand it.”Daniel Giglioli
This 20th of November marks 50 years since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in Spain. On that day, Franco died in a hospital bed as the head of state of a country he ruled with an iron fist, authoritarian and violent, for 40 years, after winning our Civil War with the help of Hitler and Mussolini. After the war, Franco imposed a fascist and criminal regime that plunged my country into one of the darkest and saddest periods in its history.
And yet, the rise of the far right today calls into question the harshness of the regime that ravaged Spain for four decades. Today we are beginning to hear that Francoism was not so bad, that it was not such a big deal, that it was a soft dictatorship… we are beginning to hear, ever louder, the narcotic whisper of the deniers. A discourse is beginning to take hold that does not exactly defend Francoism, but does present it as a “soft” regime and denies, minimises, or sugarcoats the criminal and systemic nature of Franco’s repression. It is no longer the ranting of “Viva Franco”, arms raised and blue shirts (the shirts of the Falange, the Spanish version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts). It is more subtle.
The far right is sowing doubts about the consensus that has been reached until the whisper becomes an ordinary part of the conversation. The dispute over memory is one of its battlegrounds (as it is in Italy, Argentina, Hungary, and Spain), and although until now I understood it as a denial of the criminal past of the fascisms of which they are the heirs, the step further that this reactionary whisper is taking seems to have another intention, which I would summarise as follows: if it is accepted that a dictatorship was not such a bad thing, the idea of an authoritarian government becomes more socially acceptable. It’s that simple.
The reactionary moment in the West
One of the founding pillars of fascism in the past, and of the far right today, is the one that links democracy with misgovernment or corruption. Its model is what Viktor Orbán christened (and established) in Hungary, “illiberal democracy”, a euphemism behind which to hide an electoral autocracy. This is where the attack on democratic memory comes in, lest younger generations really know what fascism was, what Francoism was: blurring the memory of what an authoritarian far-right government really means in order to make it more acceptable.
At an event in Athens commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of dictatorships in Spain, Greece, and Portugal, after hearing about the epic Carnation Revolution that overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship and the turmoil that brought down the Junta of the Colonels in Greece, I was left thinking, and when it was my turn to talk about the Spanish case, I could only begin with: “Well, in Spain, Franco died in his bed,” which made the audience smile. They immediately understood that in Spain there was no revolution, no crisis of the regime. In Spain, the dictator died shrouded in a cloak of silence and fear so thick that it covered up his crimes.
The facts are well known, but for those who minimise the criminal nature of the Franco regime, it is good to remember them, vindicate them, and continue to think about how it was possible:
between 115,000 and 130,000 disappeared; 150,000 murdered; 30,000 stolen children; 2,800 mass graves (the largest, the Valley of the Fallen, holds the remains of more than 30,000 people); 500,000 exiles; up to 300,000 political prisoners at the beginning of the military regime alone. Spain is the second country in the world with the most disappeared people in ditches. All these figures come from Judge Garzón’s investigation, to which we can add those of Javier Rodrigo: 188 concentration camps operated in Spain after the Civil War; and those of Julián Casanova, who estimated that 50,000 Reds were murdered between 1939 and 1946.
Read that last figure again. In her beautiful and essential essay El arte de invocar la memoria (The Art of Invoking Memory, 2024), historian Esther López Barceló defines the Franco regime on the basis of that number: “The mass executions of the early years of the dictatorship laid the foundations for the new state.” The numbers of Franco’s repression are only the bloody tip of the iceberg of fear on which the dictatorship was built. It is good to remember this in the country that never judged it.
One country that did was Argentina. Every 24 March, mass marches take place in its cities in memory of the 30,000 people who disappeared during the military dictatorship. Today, Milei, very much in line with the above, reduces the number to 8,000 and downplays one of the bloodiest repressions of the 20th century. “There are 30,000,” shouts the crowd, in a dispute that is not about numbers, but about futures.
In the aforementioned essay by Esther López Barceló, I find a powerful idea that connects different ways of understanding memory. She tells us that while in Buenos Aires, she visited ESMA, one of the worst torture centres in the country of the disappeared: “I knew I was in a sanctuary, in a space still heavy with the air of violence, but I was not fully aware that I was in an area cordoned off by forensic scientists: the scene of a crime that was and continues to be under judicial investigation. Don’t blame me. ‘I come from the anomaly,’ I should have told them. Spain, the scene of the perfect crime. The one that has been hidden from us until we ignored it. Until we believed that it didn’t happen. That it never happened. I come from the country of the crime that didn’t happen.”
Because we know that it did, we know what happened, and we even have a Memory Law, and yet… in the Puerta del Sol (our ESMA), there is not a single sign of the torture, not even a plaque under the window where we all know that Julián Grimau, the communist leader murdered by the regime, was thrown.
Invoking the memory that breaks them
To break the narrative that links Franco’s regime to a soft dictatorship, it is essential to talk about democratic memory, to recognise the fear imposed by mass graves. And the truth is that what really breaks them, what dismantles the reactionary whisper of “it wasn’t such a bad dictatorship”, is to do so from a place that questions them, that points them out, that tells them from the present that this wound still hurts us and that it is on this wound that we want to build a future where this will never happen again.
Years ago, David Becerra dazzled me in his study The Civil War as Literary Fashion (2015) with one of his discoveries: he denounces that for years the Civil War and Francoism have been recounted or novelised in an ahistorical way, that is, narrated from a present where the conflict is happily resolved, without a common thread, as if it had nothing to do with the conflicts of the present. As if the past and memory had no direct relationship with today and, more importantly, with our ability to project futures.
A memory for the future
“We have to learn to build a memory of resistance,” says Enzo Traverso, always lucid, and to do so, I think, we must bring the defeated out of “that perfect crime that was the repression of Francoism”, to use López Barceló’s apt words.
Using education as a tool for the future, because, as the phrase with which I begin this article strikes home, a generation that does not know, that is unaware, is doomed to repeat history. The far right disputes memory in order to open up the possibility of authoritarian government on the horizon of expectations. So let us continue to dispute the memory of resistance from the present so that our horizon is built from a different place: the idea that fascism will never return, ever again.
Marga Ferré is President of transform! europe and Co-President of The Foundation for Critical Studies / Fundación de Estudios Críticos FEC (Formerly Foundation for a Citizens’ Europe / Fundación por la Europa de los Ciudadanos), Spain.
transform! europe is a network of 38 European organisations from 22 countries, active in the field of political education and critical scientific analysis, and is the recognised political foundation corresponding to the Party of the European Left (EL). This cooperative project of independent non-profit organisations, institutes, foundations, and individuals intends to use its work in contributing to peaceful relations among peoples and a transformation of the present world.
