In 1978, that is, three years after the death of Francisco Franco, the writer Fernando Vizcaíno Casas, who the older locals will remember with that thin mustache so characteristic of followers of the regime, published a book entitled …And in the third year he was resurrected. That satirical novel – more about the Transition than the dictatorship – sold almost half a million copies, and two years later it was made into a film. In the first scenes Franco appears hitchhiking at the gate of the Valley of the Fallen. When he finally manages to stop a truck driver, the Generalissimo orders him:
—Take me to El Pardo Palace.
If today, 50 years after his death, that resurrected leader sneaked in among the visitors who this November morning paid nine euros for a visit to the palace: a Japanese couple, another Mexican and two others who seem to be extras from the first season of the series Tell me—, you would hear the guide say: “The visit will last about an hour. We will visit the entire palace, with the exception of General Franco’s private apartment, which remains closed in compliance with the Law on Historical Memory”.
“Wow, man,” mutters the Spaniard Carpetovetonic.
Almost at the end, the Mexican couple discovers that, although locked, Franco’s bedroom is still intact, with the bed made and even the same quilt as before. “What do I say,” muses another palace employee, “that this law will soon be abolished, because otherwise, what’s the point in continuing to keep the bedroom as it was, when the quilt seems to fall apart if you touch it?”
What remains of the dictatorship beyond the dictator’s bed and bathroom, his horse statues stored in underground warehouses, and a plaque for “Plaza del Caudillo” that the nostalgic owners of the La Pepenúltima bar, located across the street from the palace, placed above the door to the men’s bathroom?
The Italian singer-songwriter Giorgio Gaber (1939-2003) once said: “I am not afraid of Silvio Berlusconi, but of what Berlusconi is in me.” In this sense we asked ourselves the following question: what remains in us of these 40 years of dictatorship? Or put another way: what legacy did he leave us?
The writer Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, who in his novel castles of fire (Seix Barral) portrays the first post-war years in Madrid, replies: “The Spaniards, who were mostly Francoist until November 1975, stopped being Francoist soon after. Spanish society was accommodating and opportunistic, which we cannot be proud of, but it was precisely that accommodating and opportunistic state of society that facilitated the transition to democracy.” Martínez de Pisón utters a phrase worth framing:
The Spaniards decided to grant themselves an amnesty and strangle the Francoist within them.
And he adds: “It wasn’t difficult: the repression of the dictatorship, prolonged and at times indiscriminate, made it possible to reread one’s past in the light of victimhood. Those who had not suffered the rigors of the regime for one reason had suffered them for another, and the Spaniards hastened to claim their status as occasional victims to neutralize the memory of past complicities. Thanks to this (and unlike the Argentines, who continued to have a Peronism without Perón), we were free yourself from having a Francoist regime without Franco.”
—Is the new far right a legacy of Francoism?
—The far right has disappeared due to natural extinction. The new far right, that of Vox and Aliança Catalana, is not like that and responds more to global phenomena linked to xenophobia and the fear of immigration, a circumstance that did not exist then because no one came from outside asking for work and it was us Spaniards who had to emigrate.
The sociologist José Juan Toharia, founder of Metroscopia, has data that supports Martínez de Pisón’s thesis. “More than 80% of citizens,” he explains, “think that the current democratic system is the best in our history. But at the same time they tell you that the Franco regime had good things and bad things, that Franco did many stupid things, but that in the end he left a more advanced country – even if the truth is that the standard of living that existed in 1935 was recovered only in 1953 -. The past is remembered with nuances, not in absolute terms. This can be very irritating for those who, like “I was against Francoism, but that’s what the polls say” Toharia leaves on the table a fact that can illustrate this type of condescending view of many Spaniards towards the dictatorship:
—More than 50% of Spanish families had relatives on both sides…
Prosecutor Carlos Castresana is one of those Spaniards who have had the opportunity to look at Spain from the outside. In 1996 he was the author of the denunciations that allowed the prosecution of generals Videla and Pinochet, and in 2007 he was appointed United Nations commissioner against impunity in Guatemala. He is convinced that the imprint of the Franco regime is deeper than what can be seen with the naked eye. “I believe that we lived many wrong years, thinking that Francoism had disappeared with the transition, with the Constitution. But the dictatorship would not have lasted so long if millions of people had not supported it actively or passively. There were some active Francoists. But then there was what Franco himself called the silent majority who, out of fear or consensus, or because they enjoyed a situation which in the 1960s was no longer that of hunger, supported the dictatorship. Many of these Francoists became retrained in the UCD and then in the PP, but there are characters like José María Aznar or Esperanza Aguirre who clearly correspond to sociological Francoism. Now they have got rid of political correctness and have come out stronger”.
Prosecutor Castresana warns: “We have lived badly, but there are no longer any doubts. Francoism is there and has always been there, like a sleeping monster.”
Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón is a director and writer and in 1961, at just 21 years old, he secretly joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE).
—What remains of Francoism?
—I had thought about it, but above all words and expressions from that period come to mind. “Groupscules”, for example, as they called the various clandestine organizations of the left; “biological fact”, which was how we had to refer to the death of the dictator because people didn’t dare say “when will Franco die”; and above all the great linguistic invention that saved the transition…
Gutiérrez Aragón orders an American coffee and says that in that turbulent period of resistance to Francoism, that “underground world of opposition” was divided between the rupturistas – who defended a radical break with the regime – and the pactists, who were greatly disapproved of because they were in favor of negotiating with the more evolutionary part of Franco’s government.
—And what was the great invention?
—The great linguistic invention that saved democracy – the director replies smiling – was the term “agreed break”. In this way we managed to save the discussion.
There is another moment that caused a certain emotional rift and which still lasts today. There are many who are convinced that, from Franco’s regime to today, there is a black hole in Spanish society, something that cannot be seen but which poisons relationships, distorts them, transforms adversaries into enemies, polarizes to the point of transforming any discussion into an issue with me or against me. It should not be a coincidence that, unlike Portugal, France, Italy or Mexico, Spain does not have a date to remember together, a historical event to celebrate, a flag that unites instead of dividing. Gutiérrez Aragón tells what happened on April 9, 1977.
—We were called by the group to an event in via Orense in Madrid. We were celebrating the legalization of PCE and greeted Santiago Carrillo at the door. But when we went down the stairs, we were surprised that at the back of the room, illuminated by a spotlight, there was the red and gold flag… It was a shock. We had fought for each other, for the republican flag. Nobody had warned us… It was followed with discipline, but it was an emotional shock, because the First Republic preserved and maintained the red flag, and the Second lasted only five years… Pedagogy was missing.
Not just with the flag. And not only then.
It was 1973 and Azucena Rodríguez had just turned 18. He remembers that that afternoon was the first time his mother had given him permission to come home after 10 p.m., but he didn’t return. The police arrested her during a demonstration, locked her in a cell in the basement of the General Directorate of Security and interrogated her in the style of the time. 52 years have passed and the director is still well aware of what happened that night and also the consequences.
—On the one hand, the personal ones. I am still very afraid of sitting in a restaurant without having my shoulders covered, and I also feel uncomfortable when I see those crazy people who say atrocities at demonstrations. And there is another fear that I share with other colleagues who have also been detained, interrogated and insulted by that sinister police force. The fear of involution. That progress is not a straight line, that we can lose everything we have fought for.
Inherited sadness
There is another thing that the filmmaker underlines: “An inherited sadness, for the people who are no longer here, for the people who have suffered retaliation… There remains that well of sadness that has not been recognized. This democracy, which has many good things, continues not to recognize itself and to recognize itself in the victims of the Franco regime. And that personal sadness is transformed, even if we are not fully aware of it, into collective sadness.” Azucena Rodríguez believes, like many Spaniards, that the 6,000 graves still scattered throughout the country are a legacy of the civil war and above all of Francoism, but in some way it is also a legacy shared with all democratic governments – including the three socialist garrisons – which have not been able to eliminate this plague and injustice.
Writer Bárbara Mingo published an article in the magazine in 2019 Free letters which he titled “General shot, very close up and very general shot”. It was a chronicle with a very personal vision of the exhumation of Franco’s remains and their transfer from the Valley of the Fallen to the Mingorrubio cemetery, on the outskirts of El Pardo, a place full of flowers, eagle flags, photos of the dictator and a slow trickle of nostalgic people who approach, look, make the sign of the cross and leave.
About Franco’s legacy, 50 years later, the writer explains: “Something quite annoying is that the framework for evaluating things or ideas continues to function partly in terms of opposition or agreement, but the bottom line is that Francoism continues to be accepted as a reference. Because dictatorships are sticky and stain everything they touch, everything contemporary with Franco tends to be dismissed as Francoist, and even anti-Francoism becomes a tailor. I don’t want measure myself in these imposed terms. This is probably where the idea of impermeable ideological blocks, a sort of fanaticism, comes from.” And he adds: “I believe that there are fewer people with unshakable convictions and that we tend to assimilate the environment in which we live. That is to say that what allowed the duration and stability of the Franco regime is not very far from what now allows some circumstances that we consider good to occur. When society is free and fair, we are lucky. I am referring to workers’ rights, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, sexual freedom, etc.: respect for the lives of others even if we do not understand it. But in everything In the history of societies there has been a dominant morality. The problem is how much space each society allows each individual to develop his own, and how many free generations are needed for that individual to want to do so.
When he leaves, Gutiérrez Aragón leaves a phrase floating in the air: “History is not only made of memory, but also of oblivion. Of voluntary oblivion”.
