Since last Friday, October 31, the Government announced the start of proceedings to illegalize the Francisco Franco National Foundation, the question of the fate of its archive has arisen. Although the issue has been raised before, it has gone largely unnoticed, removed from the news. However, this is not a trivial issue, if we take into account the importance of the documentation it preserves and, above all, all that which is not accessible to the public and is little known. We have already lost too much historical heritage in our country not to take all the necessary precautions to avoid the concealment, manipulation or looting to which a large part of the archives, silent witnesses of our recent history, have been subjected.
Since its origins, this heterogeneous group, coming from the headquarters of the State, the Government and the Army for almost four decades, has maintained the same pattern: it is limited access and private use. A situation that continued throughout democracy, favoring the publication of every type of apology for the dictator and, above all, hiding an incalculable quantity of unpublished documentation of the time. Confidential information, that of the regime’s internal consumption, remains intact, while a flood of propaganda material is distributed, disorderly and impossible to counter. It has been this way since its creation. As Franco consolidates sole command, his headquarters in Burgos begins to centralize everything it is capable of generating and seizing. Shortly before the end of the war, with his government already recognized internationally, he spoke of the need to create an archive with all this documentation “for the teaching of history”. Thus was born the Archive of the Crusade or the War of Liberation, with hundreds of thousands of papers accumulated in Salamanca, home of the so-called National Delegation for the Recovery of Documents, an organization which maintained its confidential nature until 1944. There the entire process of classification of what was initially called “retrospective information”, later known as “political-social”, was centralized and managed, with the documentation of the occupation of the republican territory and large cities. An enormous mass of documents that grew even more with the archive of Masonic antecedents and with the central registry of all the so-called special jurisdictions until the end of the dictatorship. In the same year 1944, when the classification of the documentation seized in the port of Alicante was completed, the delegation estimated “around four million files and documents preserved in its facilities”.
The archive’s work continues, but its existence is not made public until the early 1960s. It is starting to be used to refute studies critical of the regime published abroad. The historian Ricardo de la Cierva consulted its collections privately, at least between 1973 and 1980, the year in which he was appointed Minister of Culture. At the beginning of the 1980s, another similar historian, Luis Suárez, prosecutor of the Francoist Cortes, will also have access to the documentation in a prolonged and exclusive way. In 1984 he published his well-known biography of the general, reworked and revised several times. In that period the Francisco Franco National Foundation began its work of custody and classification of the archive, the results of which were made public in 1992, with the appearance of the Unpublished documents for the history of Generalissimo Franco. These two volumes can be considered the first catalog of the archive’s so-called “personal” funds. The rest would follow a long journey to this day. Much of it passes through the Army Command in Madrid and through the different military governments until, much later and in different phases, they are transferred to the General Military Archive in Ávila. However, the bulk of the private documentation would remain at the Franco Foundation. We had to wait until 2000 for another part to arrive, in microfilm rolls, to the Ministry of Education, which sent them to the Salamanca Archive. The nearly 27,500 copies of documents deposited in the Documentary Center of Historical Memory constitute an important inventory of Franco’s administration, covering practically all aspects of the dictatorship, as well as its main institutions and ministries, but they barely represent a small part of the total set and are still reproductions of copies.
This is the fundamental problem of the archive: the original collections are fragmented and are never made public or shown complete. There are completely empty Salamanca sandwiches. The documentation appears in the foundation’s catalog in the personal accounts of the general’s house, but does not appear in the copies displayed in the room. Something similar happens with Franco’s personal correspondence. There is an incessant flow of letters in different media that do not appear in the archive either for researchers or for the general public. With varied and familiar themes, they abound with a human dimension and close to the life of Francisco Franco, but the same media that publish them never cite the reference or background of the archive in which they are found. Beyond this calculated image of the good dictator, there is an abundant correspondence with historical protagonists, at various decisive moments, which remains virtually unknown. For example the one between Franco and General Beigbeder. The complete series of the key character to ensure the basis of the revolt between Morocco and the Peninsula, Foreign Minister in the first post-war year, is not available. But even more paradigmatic is what happens with another essential figure in the war and in the consolidation of the dictatorship, such as Yagüe. The soldier, minister and captain general have amassed a documentary legacy that his family has renounced public access to, which after decades of litigation with the foundation they have failed to achieve. It happens in many other cases. Classified under the cover of personal affairs, there are many other funds belonging to the Head of State. In the field of secret services, for example, the JONS FET Information and Research Delegation or the reports of military attachés abroad during the Second World War should be mentioned. Just two examples of the importance of this archive for demystifying the history consecrated by the Franco regime.
The risk that this original information will be altered or disappear forever while your illegalization case is being processed is not to be taken lightly. Likewise, the opportunity to inventory all this documentation, to incorporate it into all public archives, cannot be missed. This was done with materials, institutional or private, from personalities and organizations of dictatorships of different types such as in Germany, Russia, Italy or Portugal. Until it is protected, this archive will continue to be a living metaphor of our past in the present, as it constitutes one of the most notable anomalies, although not the only one, in terms of research, access and knowledge of our recent history. In the meantime, the fragmented, altered and sweetened vision of Francoism will continue to have its space and its place.
