Newswise — As the old Saturday Night Live joke goes, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
His 36-year reign, however, begun in bloodshed and retribution in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, remains a source of very live contention in Spain. April 9, the Spanish government officially moved to declare Franco’s rule a dictatorship, a step seen by many in the rest of the world as an obvious one, but which has opened old wounds in a country just a generation removed from Franco’s death in 1975, with charges of apologism and whitewashing being leveled at politicians and academics.
“It’s a travesty he wasn’t clearly identified by Spain as a dictator until now,” said Scott Eastman, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history at Creighton University who specializes in Spanish history and Spanish nationalism. “The roots of that are obviously in the Spanish Civil War and there are still a lot of apologists in the government, a small number of ex-Francoists who still haven’t quite come to terms with what happened.”
Franco’s rise in Spain coincided with the advent of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy and Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Between 1936 and 1939, Franco led a Right-wing revolution against Spain’s Left-leaning, burgeoning democracy, which had overthrown the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera along with the country’s long embattled monarchy.
After Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, just months before Hitler touched off World War II with the invasion of Poland, there were years of repression and recriminations against his former enemies, including forced labor and mass executions with victims numbering into the hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, as Franco and Spain remained aloof from World War II and its less than pleasurable adjuncts for Hitler and Mussolini, the regime gained legitimacy and even forged alliances with the United States and other nations.
The coziness with the Western victors of World War II, Eastman said, may have been aided by a willingness of those nations to ignore Franco’s record and also appreciate that he had managed to keep at bay Communism, which had co-opted the Second Spanish Republican government by the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War.
“Franco is seen as perhaps not as fascist as Hitler or Mussolini,” Eastman said. “But in the beginning, he’s every bit as brutal. By the 1950s and 60s, it’s a milder dictatorship, but after his death, there’s a move to whitewash just about everything he did to gain and hold power.”
In the last quarter-century, more efforts have been made by Spain’s public intellectuals to get the government to recognize Franco as a dictator and also to uncover his many crimes. Mass graves are being unearthed at sites around the country and Spain’s Royal Academy of History is planning to reverse its stance outlined in a 2011 publication that described Franco in nearly heroic terms and referred to his regime as “authoritarian, but not totalitarian.”
A “Pact of Forgetting” about Franco remained the status quo in higher circles of government and academia, Eastman said, a way for the nation to move on after a transition to democracy, culminating in a new constitution in 1978. But the willingness to sweep the regime under the rug has proved problematic, especially as Spain now contends with resurgent nationalist movements among its Basque and Catalan populations.
“They’re not necessarily saying the government is oppressive, but they’re trying to make a case for their independence,” Eastman said. “In doing so, it’s brought up a lot of these memories of the civil war and Francisco Franco. Catalonia held out nearly to the very end, with some of the last battles happening around Barcelona.”
As an expert in Spanish nationalism, Eastman said there’s been a tendency to shy away from that subject, given the misdeeds of the Franco regime. But he added a new conversation about Franco, the Spanish Civil War and Spanish democratization is starting in an unlikely place: among the newest generation in Spain, a group of young people who were born well after the dictatorship.
“Scholars, including most historians, didn’t shy away from Franco’s brutal repression in the early 1940s, the economic policies of autarky, or even the transition to democracy,” Eastman said. “But what they didn’t write about was Spanish national identity, because at that point it had been conflated with Francoism and his extreme conservative vision of a traditional Catholic Spain. So in some ways, this has allowed competing nationalisms in the Basque Country and in Catalonia to flourish, because ‘Spanishness’ was equated with Franco’s dictatorial rule and crusading mentality.
“If you did write about Spanish nationalism, you were seen as a Right-wing apologist. But what the young people now are talking about is how it’s important to work through what happened under Franco. They’ve heard their parents talk about the repression under Franco and they’re interested because there’s a perception they’re seeing it in the present with the Basques and in Catalonia.”
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