On the more than five million tiles that cover the mosaic of the Last Judgment of the vault of the crypt of the Valley of the Fallen lies the recent history of Spain, but does not rest in peace. The Abbey of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen, or Cuelgamuros , as the prisoners and prisoners of war who built it baptized it, is the quintessential public symbol of Francoism , and continues to fulfill virtually all the objectives with which it was designed as memorial before the Civil War ended. The majority, as we will try to see, have gone to the background since the moment he was buried there, in a central and privileged place of construction as corresponded to the then Head of State, General Francisco Franco. After almost forty-five years, its magnetism has been weakening almost proportionally to the modernization and democratic configuration of our society , but it has not disappeared completely.

The so-called sociological Francoism , fruit without a doubt of the long duration of the dictatorship and of the economic, cultural and social changes that the Spanish population lived during almost four decades, cannot be reduced to an exclusively nostalgic or extreme right profile. Perceiving it like this is a mistake. It has also changed its identification with most of the symbols of Francoism that no longer have any meaning or usefulness in an accelerated present that has blurred most of its referents of the early twentieth century. However, there is an emotional element in which they can still recognize themselves collectively and in which they may feel aggrieved if Franco's exhumation is covered with revenge dyes , as they have already announced and, in a way, have been doing for some time, the detractors of this measure.

The issue is complex and is anchored in the traumatic memory left by civil wars . Composed of family stories, silence and pain, but still an orphaned version of an official version in which to recognize oneself, it remains periodically exposed to its partisan use, not only in ideological terms of left and right, but in a much broader sense of rights and freedoms. The Franco family has been able to exercise the measures they have considered appropriate to guarantee their right to decide on their grandfather's remains. The same that must be guaranteed to the thousands of people who still look for their loved ones pending identification in a common grave. The State, finally, has the obligation to intervene and defend public interests , since this whole space constitutes a National Heritage Monument, in which the remains of the dictator continue to rest, an anomaly unparalleled not only among our European neighbors but also world level, as noted by the United Nations not long ago, which contradicts the essence of any modern democratic state.

At stake, therefore, much more than a timely measure. There is an opportunity to reconcile this with a series of measures that mark a before and after in public memory policies in Spain so that they are not internalized as a threat by the population and are automatically blocked depending on the turn or sign politician. Rather than stop invoking the ghosts of the past, which no longer serve or are scary except in certain strata, it would be worth trying to regain true interest in our past so that it ceases to be used as a throwing weapon . The history of the Valley of the Fallen itself serves as an example, since by its own propaganda vocation since its inception, its construction in full dictatorship and questioning since the Transition to democracy, has passed through all strata of official image, forgetfulness and forgetfulness deliberate that they mark our time.

Begun in 1940, although the works did not end until the end of the fifties, the Valley of the Fallen was devised by the National Propaganda Service before the end of the War, to commemorate "the fallen by God and by Spain." The others, the defeated, were not only excluded, but were forced to build republican prisoners and prisoners of war . The first under the formula of redemption of penalties for work (those with a final sentence), and framed in battalions of forced labor the second, were shaping a gigantic work that was left to the large private construction companies such as Huarte, Banús and other subsidiaries of the moment. That is one of the main problems that arise when resignifying the monument, how to integrate those who were excluded from it? This issue was warned, it seems, shortly after construction began but its initial plans were not altered. As the postwar period moved away, a procedure was started that ordered the municipalities to exhume the mass graves of their municipal district and transfer their remains to the Valley itself. Today there are located more than thirty-three thousand corpses transferred by force and without the consent of their relatives. An element that should not be forgotten in the distribution of rights and legitimacies that are usually put into play when talking about this space. Space that was appropriated more and more elements of concentration of power in which it ended up consecrating the scheme of Franco itself as an anti-modern political religion. All its elements indicate this, starting with the location: the Escorial, emblematic place of the Imperial Monarchy of Philip II and burial of the kings of Spain . Second, the traditionalist Catholic element, identified with the redeeming cross , the highest that could be raised to be seen from Madrid. The crypt, in third place, would be destined to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a formula with which Falangism was involved in the new Franco state. This mixture of political and religious elements in a particular Baroque style expressed a final element, that of the military corporate identity of a budding dictatorship, which aesthetically reflected its ideals, marked from beginning to end by the Civil War.

The enclosure was also intended for other uses not only commemorative. In May 1939, when the location or the definitive plans of the Valley were not yet decided, Marcelino de Ulibarri , head of the Document Recovery Service, transferred to Franco the possibility of creating a large study center or archive of the Crusade there, concentrated all seized documentation. The place chosen finally was Salamanca, where it continued to be sent, cataloging documentation, information and bibliography, in order to create that archive and study center "in order to free the peoples from the disastrous end to which modern errors inexorably lead."

For all these elements that make it up the Valley could be a place to show our recent history. That it serves the youngest people to touch, see and understand in situ this project and its realization, in which more than thirty thousand people were working for years against their will, despite what has sometimes been said about free workers . In the same space there are thirty-three thousand more, dead from both sides of the Civil War , exhumed and taken there without the permission or consent of anyone . And in which Franco and José Antonio are also buried, for different reasons. A place that could serve as an excellent didactic tool, besides being able to house a historical archive of the first magnitude to which the funds of the abbey itself join researchers from all over the world. In short, it is about making this a central cultural, educational and research issue, to make a 21st century monument that does not separate but one.

Gutmaro Gómez Bravo is a professor of Contemporary History UCM and coordinator of A vida o muerte: the persecution of the Spanish Republicans (FCE, 2018). His latest published book is Human Geography of Franco's Repression (Cátedra, 2017).

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