Unearthing Franco's Legacy

The recent furore over Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón’s failed attempts to indict Franco and thirty-four of his closest associates for crimes against humanity shows the extent to which the brutal Francoist repression and its legacy have become fiercely contested issues in Spain. Garzón’s investigation was initiated on the request of Recovery of Historical Memory associations that have emerged in the last decade to demand justice for Franco’s victims. Broadly speaking, this grassroots movement is based on two assumptions. First, Franco waged a war of extermination against his political enemies (principally the left); and second, the restoration of democracy in the 1970s was based on a collective ‘pact of silence’ towards Francoist crimes. These arguments have received the support of some leading historians in Spain such as Julián Casanova. Others, while not denying the many injustices of the Franco regime, have been more critical. Perhaps the most prolific and eloquent critic of the ‘pact of silence’ thesis, for example, is Santos Juliá. Professor in the UNED, Spain’s university of distance learning, Juliá is no neo-Francoist right-wing polemicist, but instead a social-democratic historian who writes a column in the centre-left El País and in 1999 co-edited Víctimas de la guerra civil, one of the most influential studies of repression during and after the Civil War. He argues that amnesty (in the Spanish context, an agreement not to prosecute political crimes committed before December 1976) has been confused with historical amnesia, and points to the explosion of publications on all aspects of the Second Republic, the Civil War and the Franco regime that appeared in the 1970s. These views have been received with derision and scorn by advocates of the ‘recovery of historical memory’. In an article published in the virtual journal Hispania Nova in 2007, the Marxist historian Francisco Espinosa Maestre accused Santos Juliá of selling out to the neo-Francoist right

Amnesty · Art · Complicity · Context (archaeology · Crimes against humanity · Democracy · Economic Justice · Grassroots · Political science · Politics · Silence · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · War crime · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Spanish Culture and Identity