Exhuming Franco

Sebastiaan Faber

Description

Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism.

This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.

 
The removal of the General [Queipo de Llano]’s remains from the Basilica in Seville in the early morning of November 3 was one of the first measures prompted by Spain’s new Law of Democratic Memory, which the country’s Senate approved on October 5, 2022, and which went into effect on October 20. The left-of-center coalition government of prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, hailed the law as an important next step in the country’s coming to terms with the legacies of the Civil War (1936-39) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-75). But not everyone agreed.  

The Law of Democratic Memory was adopted two years after the event that sparked the first edition of this book: the exhumation of the dictator’s remains from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen. Much like Franco’s exhumation, the debate around the memory law served to reveal not only the fault lines that divide the political Left from the Right, but also the considerable gap between the demands of the grassroots memory movement—whose insistent pressure helped prompt both the exhumation and the law—and the government’s response to those demands. 

The stated objective of the new legislation, which occupies 55 single-spaced pages in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, is to build on, update, and improve the memory law adopted 15 years earlier, in 2007, under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, then leader of the Socialist Party. Indeed, comparing the two laws is as good a way as any to measure what’s changed in the way Spain, or at least part of Spain, thinks about its violent twentieth-century past. 

 
Introduction to the New Edition
    Introduction to the First Edition
    1. Securely Tied Down
    2. How Dead Is He?
    3. Surreptitious Survival
    4. Ignacio Echevarría
    5. Guillem Martínez
    6. The Judiciary
    7. Sebastián Martín
    8. Ricardo Robledo
    9. José Antonio Zarzalejos
    10. Politics and the Territorial Challenge
    11. Marina Garcés
    12. Enric Juliana
    13. Antonio Maestre
    14. The Media
    15. Cristina Fallarás
    16. Olga Rodríguez
    17. Marije Hristova
    18. Ricard Vinyes
    19. Emilio Silva
    Conclusion. Not So Different After All
    Acknowledgments
    Interviews and Correspondence
    Bibliography
    Index  
 

Sujets

• Histoire
• Cataluña
• Spanish Civil War
• Anti-fascism
• Francoist Spain
• Populism
• Franco
• Neo-fascism
• Spain
• Nationalism
• Fascism
• Dictatorship
• Catalonia
• Memory
• Spain (groupe)
• Democracy
• History
• Francisco Franco
• Catalogne
• Media
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826501745
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION:
“Faber’s book returns to a crucial problem for Spanish democracy and offers a catalogue of answers that are an invitation to rewrite the history of Francoism.”
—ÓSCAR BUZNEGO, El periódico de España
“Independent, intelligent, uncomfortable, open to dialogue and discussion. Necessary.”
—GUILLEM MARTÍNEZ, Contexto
“[This book] makes clear that our teaching of history cannot take anything for granted. We have to know what happened in order to exhume not only Franco’s remains but the subsoil of authoritarian habits that persist and prosper.”
—MARIO MARTÍN GIJÓN, El Periódico de Extramadura
“An excellent book which helps you get to grips with very real problems facing Spain and examine potential solutions.”
—CHRIS BAMBERY, Brave New Europe
“Sebastiaan Faber’s scholarship is unique among Hispanists, bringing together the rigor of academia with the incisiveness of journalism. Few scholars of contemporary Spain have taken the role of writing for a learned but non-specialist readership as seriously and successfully as Faber has.”
—MARI PAZ BALIBREA, The Historian
“The book has the feel of a respectful, well-informed and informative debate in Hyde Park Corner.”
—JOSHUA GOODE, The Volunteer
EXHUMING FRANCO
EXHUMING FRANCO
Spain’s Second Transition
EXPANDED SECOND EDITION
SEBASTIAAN FABER
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright expanded edition 2023 Vanderbilt University Press
Published originally in English in 2021.
First paperback edition published 2021.
All rights reserved
First printing 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Faber, Sebastiaan, 1969– author.
Title: Exhuming Franco : Spain’s second transition / Sebastiaan Faber.
Description: Expanded second edition. | Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023036847 | ISBN 9780826506375 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Franco, Francisco, 1892–1975—Influence. | Spain—Politics and government—1982– | Francoism. | Intellectuals—Spain—Interviews. | Collective memory—Spain. | Exhumation—Spain—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC DP264.F7 F25 2023 | DDC 946.084—dc23/eng/20230804
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036847
To Kim, Jakob, and Maya
Contents
INTRODUCTION to the Second Edition
INTRODUCTION to the First Edition. Securely Tied Down
1. How Dead Is He?
2. Surreptitious Survival
3. Ignacio Echevarría
4. Guillem Martínez
5. The Judiciary
6. Sebastián Martín
7. Ricardo Robledo
8. José Antonio Zarzalejos
9. Politics and the Territorial Challenge
10. Marina Garcés
11. Enric Juliana
12. Antonio Maestre
13. The Media
14. Cristina Fallarás
15. Olga Rodríguez
16. Marije Hristova
17. Ricard Vinyes
18. Emilio Silva
CONCLUSION. Not So Different After All
Acknowledgments
Interviews and Correspondence
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
“Can I ask you a quick question?” Microphone in hand, the reporter Borja Jiménez walked up to four citizens from Seville who were standing outside the Basílica de la Macarena, one of the city’s most iconic churches, late in the evening on Wednesday, November 2, 2022. “The remains of Queipo de Llano are about to be expelled,” the reporter said, “and we would just like to know if you think that’s a good idea. Or if you think that’s normal” (Pérez Cortés 2022).
The right-wing Spanish newspaper OKDiario was live-streaming the late-night exhumation—or, as the reporter put it, the expulsion —of general Gonzalo Queipo de Llano (1875–1951), who became world famous during the Spanish Civil War. Having joined the military coup to overthrow the Spanish government in 1936, he was put in charge of conquering Seville and repressing any and all resistance to the coup in Andalusia. This he did without mercy: known for his drunken, misogynistic radio harangues and for his likely role in the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca, he also is considered directly responsible for some forty-five thousand executions. When he died in 1951, at the height of the Francoist dictatorship, Queipo was given a hero’s burial. His tombstone, prominently visible in the church floor, had remained untouched since then.
As Jiménez, the reporter, held his microphone up to Manuel Pérez Cortés, one of the four people he’d approached, he clearly did not get the response he’d hoped for. “Better to have him out than in,” Pérez Cortés said, in a sevillano accent: “ Mejó fuera que dentro .”
“Why?” Jiménez asked, surprised.
“Because this man did a lot of harm to us sevillanos and to the macarenos , too,” Pérez Cortés replied, referring to the people of the Macarena district.
Still, the reporter was not ready to give up. Here is part of the exchange that followed:
BORJA JIMÉNEZ (BJ): “But in the end—and mind you, I am just posing this as a question—isn’t this an attempt to erase history?”
MANUEL PÉREZ CORTÉS (MPC): “Not at all. What’s being done here is justice. This is a working-class neighborhood. Humble people live here. And many macarenos died at the hands of this man. Enough already with tainting history.”
BJ: “You’re here because of Queipo?”
MPC: “I’m a member of the Brotherhood of the Macarena [a religious association associated with the Basilica] and came here to attend Mass.”
BJ: “Yet you agree with the exhumation?”
MPC: “Of course I do.”
BJ: “Well, we’re actually having a hard time finding many people who agree.”
MPC: “It’s not that hard, believe me. [ . . . ] Maybe you’re not looking where you should.” (Álvarez 2022)
The removal of the general’s remains from the Basilica in Seville in the early morning of November 3 was one of the first measures prompted by Spain’s new Law of Democratic Memory, which the country’s Senate approved on October 5, 2022, and which went into effect on October 20. (The law stipulates among other things that “the mortal remains of those who led the 1936 military coup cannot be . . . buried in a publicly accessible, preeminent location that is not a cemetery”; Boletín del Estado 2022, 32). The left-of-center coalition government of prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, hailed the law as an important next step in the country’s coming to terms with the legacies of the Civil War (1936–39) and the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). But not everyone agreed.
The Law of Democratic Memory was adopted two years after the event that sparked the first edition of this book: the exhumation of the dictator’s remains from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen, now renamed the Valley of Cuelgamuros, after the valley where it was built. Much like Franco’s exhumation, the debate around the memory law served to reveal not only the fault lines that divide the political Left from the Right, but also the considerable gap between the demands of the grassroots memory movement—whose insistent pressure helped prompt both the exhumation and the law—and the government’s response to those demands.
Emilio Silva, the founding president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (whom I interview in Chapter 18 ), has been quite critical of the new law, for example (Rivas 2022). He has pointed out three important weaknesses. First, while the law seems to place the victims of violence and repression front and center, it is strangely silent about the perpetrators; especially absent in the latter category is the Catholic Church, which supported the 1936 coup and became a powerful accomplice of the Franco regime. Second, possible reparations for victims are largely limited to the symbolic realm. For instance, the law declares all the judicial “sentences and sanctions issued during the War and the Dictatorship for reasons of politics, ideology, conscience or religious belief or sexual orientation and identity” to be “illegal and radically null.” Yet it also states that while this nullification “will create the right to obtain a declaration of personal acknowledgment and reparation,” it cannot be read as an “acknowledgment of financial responsibility on the part of the state, any public administration, or any private citizen” or be used to claim any kind of “reparation or compensation of a financial or professional character” (Boletín del Estado 2022, 20). Third, while the law creates a special state prosecutor for “human rights and democratic memory,” it does not revoke the 1977 Amnesty Law—a law that, as I explain in Chapter 5 , the Spanish judiciary has cited time and again to block any judicial attempt to investigate, let alone prosecute, human rights violations committed between 1936 and 1975. Whether the new law will change the courts’ views remains to be seen. The first signals are mixed. In May 2023, a court in Madrid admitted a case brought by an activist who had been arrested and tortured by Francoist police in 1975—a first—only to suspend it on the day the victim was called up to testify (Pascual 2023b). In another, similar case, this one involving an arrest and torture suffered by a union activist in Barcelona in 1970, the regional government of Catalonia itself has joined the victim in bringing charges, although it is unclear whether the case will be admitted (Camps 2023).
The stated objective of the new legislation, which occupies fifty-five single-spaced pages in the Boletín Oficial del Estado , is to build on, update, and improve the memory law adopted fifteen years earlier, in 2007, under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, then leader of the Socialist Party. Indeed, comparing the two laws is as good a way as any to measure what’s changed in the way Spain, or at least part of Spain, thinks about its violent twentieth-century past. For example, while the preamble of the earlier law celebrated the “spirit of the Transition,” framing the country’s democratization as a process peculiar to Spain, the new preamble clearly places Spaniards’ ethica