of the French-Spanish border between 1975 and 1981, and became the prototype for the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), the state-sponsored death squads in operation between 1982, the year that marked Spain’s return to left-wing rule since the Republican period, and 1986.
Francoist Political Socialization
A more subtle but no less insidious form of Francoist repression was the cynical manipulation of Spanish history. As the victor in the Civil War, Franco had ample opportunity to rewrite history for his own political purposes. His manipulation of Spanish history aimed to confuse and obscure the facts about the Civil War, with the intention of socializing the citizenry into accepting a state-sanctioned interpretation of the war that bore little connection to history and served to justify the authoritarian regime. Aiding Franco’s manipulation of history was the public’s high level of ignorance about the events leading to the Civil War, a development greatly facilitated by the reluctance of ordinary Spaniards to talk candidly about the Civil War as part of their daily lives. According to one survey (CIS 2008), 43 percent of respondents claimed that during their childhood and adolescence their families spoke “little about the war,” while 30 percent claimed there was no discussion of the war at all. But ignorance about the Civil War was also cultivated by a dearth of objective attention to the war on the part of education authorities.
An exhaustive study of Spanish textbooks of the Francoist era by historian Rafael Valls (2007: 157) notes: “History textbooks of this period scarcely ever present detailed historical information about the Second Republic and the Civil War. Instead, they reduce their presentation to negative moral judgment of the Republican period, in which the names of major protagonists are omitted, together with their reformist efforts. The result is that textbooks avoid presenting even minimal historical context for this period, which could facilitate the students’ ability to understand its development.” Valls adds that treatment of the Civil War is not “well-developed” in the textbooks of the Francoist era.17 Indeed, the textbooks emphasize that during the 1930s Spain experienced not a war per se but rather an epic rescue by Franco’s Nationalist army. Thus, El Alzamiento (The Uprising), Franco’s rebellion against the Second Republic, is described in “near mythical terms,” presenting those who staged this insurgency as “representing everything of sanity that remained in society.” By contrast, particular scorn is reserved for the Republicans and the Republican period. Valls notes that the need to legitimize the illegal military intervention staged by Franco in 1936 led unavoidably to the “demonization of all reformist projects of the Second Republic and those who had been involved in carrying them out.” All Republican efforts are described as “anti-national, anti-Catholic, manipulated by foreigners, separatist, Marxist, Bolshevik and causing disasters, disorder, and crimes.” The deliberate point is to associate the history of the Republic with partisan squabbling and endemic anti-clericalism.
Whenever the actual conflict among the Spaniards is discussed in Francoist textbooks, it is euphemistically referred to as “The Crusade,” “The War of Liberation,” or “The War of Salvation,” and generally characterized as a clash of patriots against hostile foreigners, communists, and anarchists in particular. The intention of state authorities was to portray the Nationalist victors as saviors and the defeated Republicans as foreign-influenced traitors. Only after Franco’s death in 1975 did official education materials accept terms such as “The Spanish War” or “The War of Spain” to refer to the Civil War. It was also during the late Franco period that “acts of heroism on both sides” of the Civil War began to be noted. This period also began to see descriptions of the early Franco period as having entailed “a difficult period of domestic conciliation.” The textbooks, however, “say nothing about the repression and violence carried out during the Civil War by the rebels, or the repression of the first years under Franco, of the large population of exiles caused by the war, nor of the severe poverty that the majority of the population suffered during the twenty years from 1940 to 1960.”
Glorifying the Nationalist Cause
State policy under Franco reinforced what was being taught in the classroom by emphasizing the theme of national salvation from the chaos and destruction of the Civil War together with a determination never again to experience this kind of travail. It was routine for Franco to exaggerate the number of people who died in the Civil War, a conflict he himself provoked. Un millón de muertos (one million dead) was the phrase commonly used by Francoist authorities when accounting for the number of Spaniards who perished in the Civil War, a figure that, as seen already, does not correspond with historical research. More disturbing still, the mythical figure of one million was employed by the regime to suggest “ownership of the victims by the Nationalist side,” as if “the only deaths had been those of the winning side; as if no Republicans had died on the fronts and in the rearguard, or had been shot in the subsequent period of repression” (Aguilar 2002: 75). In any case, the main intention of exaggerating the number of casualties was a calculated one: “to impress upon the people the extraordinarily high cost of the war (Jackson 1965: 526). This mission was boosted by conceptions of the Civil War in the popular culture. The phrase “one million dead” became engraved in the minds of the Spanish, especially after it became the title of one of the better-known fictionalized accounts of the Civil War by the novelist José María Gironella.
Key events of the Civil War were reconstructed in a way that bore virtually no connection to the historical record. A case in point is the bombing of Guernica, arguably the most iconic battleground of the Civil War, by German planes in April 1937, at Franco’s request. According to official documents from the Basque government, the bombing reduced this historic Basque village to rubble and killed 1,654 people (about a third of the village’s population). Such devastation inspired Picasso’s iconic Guernica, a painting intended by the artist to depict the horrors of right-wing violence in his native Spain and credited with helping change world opinion about the Spanish Civil War in favor of the Republicans. Incredibly, the Franco regime turned this episode into evidence of the cruelty of the Basque people.18 According to the Franco regime’s official story, “the villagers torched their own city”; no German participation in the bombing is even acknowledged (Aguilar 2008: 163).
Public monuments glorifying the 1936 Nationalist uprising against the Republican government were designed to shape public perception about the Civil War and the dictatorship. The town of Belchite, in the province of Zaragoza, site of the Battle of Belchite (1937), was subjected to a bizarre form of memorializing by being preserved in its complete destruction as a “vivid testament of the catastrophe that occurred in Spain and of the supposed viciousness of the Republicans” (Aguilar 2008: 163).”19 Franco rebuilt the city in 1939, next to the ruins of the old one, as an example of his regime’s capacity to bring peace and order back to Spain. The ultimate (and most controversial) act of consecration of the memory of “the Spirit of 1936” and its protagonists, however, was the construction of El Valle de los Caídos, Franco’s monumental edifice to the “heroes” of the Civil War, roughly 30 miles from Madrid. The monument owes its notoriety, among other reasons, to its imposing architecture, widely derided as a prime example of fascist theatricality. As such, El Valle seems to have failed to live up to the expectations of its main architect, Diego Méndez, who envisioned homage to traditional Spanish neoclassical architecture, along the lines of the neighboring royal monastery El Escorial, distinguished by its austere design. El Valle houses the Basílica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, only slightly smaller than St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican (its original size was actually larger than St. Peter’s but it was later modified out of respect to the pope), topped by a 500-foot cross, the tallest in the world, visible from miles away.20
Franco intended El Valle—commenced in 1940, just months after the end of the Civil War—to be built in just one year to memorialize “the Christian struggle against the ardently anti-clerical Republic,” in keeping with the notion of Spain as “God’s chosen nation” (Hite 2008: 5). However, due to the economic hardship of the postwar years and the difficulties posed by the complexity of its design, the monument took nearly two decades to complete. Trying to lower construction costs during a time of great economic stress, Franco resorted to using Republican prisoners to help build the monument, thereby surrounding it with even greater controversy and infamy.21 The workers were forced