We were going to visit a couple of friends who had just become parents. They had gone to live in a small town in Las Merindades (Burgos) and shortly before arriving I saw the sign: Valdenoceda. I had heard that name a thousand times. We stopped and snuck into the prison where my great-grandfather, a militant communist, had been held before he escaped and went into exile in France. I was very impressed with how small it was; Then I read that the Franco regime hadn’t even bothered to use that old factory as a prison, which was one of the most terrible of the time due to overcrowding. In five years more than 5,800 prisoners passed through there.
There were so few cells that I photographed them all. Later I showed them to my grandfather, because the moss growing on the floor and the falling beams were the triumph, years later, of his father, who was only able to return to Spain dead. He was the first one I thought of after learning the CIS data that have caused the most talk in the last week: almost 25% of young people between 18 and 24 believe that the current democratic system is equal to or worse than Franco’s dictatorship.
There are those who say that for most of them Franco is nothing more than a meme, a character kitschwhich is a sophisticated way of saying what old people have always said about young people: that they are brainless. There are those who are content to explain that the rebellion has changed sides, that the generations are always pendulum or that the problem is the history books, in which Francoism always arrives in the third quarter, when it is already hot and the kids are listless. They may all be right, but they are rather poor reasons, some even refutable: Francoism is not only in history books but also in literature books, not only in schools but in the news, in museums, in the oral memory of many families.
Perhaps, before giving so many answers, we should ask ourselves more questions. What do kids mean when they talk about Francoism; to the 1940s, carefully portrayed by Nieves Conde in Groovesor seventy? What do you think is enviable about that period: that the legislation was profoundly unfair to women, as Mercedes Formica pointed out, or that public housing construction was much greater then than it is today? Does it make sense to remove the yoke and arrows from the VPO housing if blocks similar to those that still have them are not built?
The same phenomenon that is happening here is being replicated in the countries of the former Soviet orbit, and not only among young people: last year when European farmers took to the streets with their tractors, there was a big scandal because here some were carrying Francoist flags, but in Eastern Europe you could see flags of the communist republics. And surely what those farmers wanted and what the young people want is not fascism or communism, but sovereignty, certainties or the possibility of earning a living through one’s own work.
To find the reasons for their nostalgia, perhaps it is more useful to look not so much at them, but at the broken promises – material but also anthropological – made to them by the Europe of progress, globalization and liberal democracy. And in the desperation and frustration they must feel when they see them breaking and all they get in response is that they don’t complain, which could be worse. As true as that is.
