The Spanish Left’s Path from Reconciliation to Revenge

In October 2022, the Spanish government, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), passed a new Democratic Memory Law. Sánchez announced that the law would “settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past” and bring “justice, reparation, and dignity” to victims of human rights abuses perpetrated during the 1936–39 Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

The 2022 Democratic Memory Law is not Spain’s first attempt at confronting its recent past. Since the transition to democracy in 1975, major historical remembrance measures have been adopted to address Franco’s legacy. These policies, while presented by proponents as good-faith endeavors at establishing a democratic consensus, actually serve leftist partisan aims.

Spain’s transition to democracy after Franco’s dictatorship was in contrast to neighboring Portugal, where in 1974, the ultraconservative Estado Novo government was overthrown by a military coup. This supposedly showed Spain’s more conciliatory character. In Spain, the transition entailed a negotiated compromise between reform-minded elements in the Francoist government and moderate opposition forces. Political Scientist Paloma Aguilar Fernández argues that the transition rested on an acknowledgment by leaders on both sides of the political aisle that the Spanish Civil War was a “fratricidal tragedy for which responsibility was equally shared, a social memory summed up by the slogans ‘never again’ and ‘we were all guilty.’”

Fearful of reopening old wounds, transitional elites agreed among themselves to avoid using public space to relitigate past events. A major product of this consensus is the Amnesty Law of 1977, which prohibits the prosecution of all politically motivated crimes committed during the Civil War and later under Franco’s regime.

While sometimes denounced as a “Pact of Forgetting,” the transition carried a lot more nuance than its detractors would like to think. Amnesty permitted the creation of a tolerant political system. Francoist technocrats, whose expertise was essential to the functioning of the state and private economy, were allowed to remain in their posts. Anti-Franco dissidents who were implicated in mass atrocities could return from exile and become stakeholders in the new democracy. One such person was Santiago Carrillo, the exiled former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) who in 1936 was suspected of having ordered the execution of more than 2,500 civilian prisoners in the town of Paracuellos de Jarama. Carrillo denied involvement in the killings and later served as a member of the Congress of Deputies for nearly a decade.

The state’s reluctance to assign one-sided blame for the Civil War and the subsequent reprisals was also shared by the wider public. Opinion polls from the 1980s to the early 2000s consistently showed that a majority of Spaniards were against an official reckoning, citing a fear that it could reignite political violence in a fragile political culture.

Finally, “amnesty” is not to be confused with “amnesia,” as historian Santos Juliá Díaz explains. No measures kept citizens from telling their personal histories. Nor was there censorship against scholarly endeavors to reconstruct history. Therefore, the “Pact of Forgetting” is more like a “pact of silence,” one that merely prevents the state from judging old iniquities while still permitting private individuals to make such judgments.

Grassroots efforts at historical remembrance boomed, the very opposite of forgetting. Authors like Pío Moa, César Vidal, Javier Tusell, and Ricardo de la Cierva rose to fame by writing histories of the Spanish Civil War, even though not all of their work showed equal academic rigor. Civil society groups like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory were founded to facilitate the exhumation of Civil War and Franco-era victims. Even though the Socialist government of Prime Minister Felipe González abstained from publicly commemorating what he called an “uncivil war” on its 50th anniversary in 1986, scholars on the left managed to organize dozens of conferences and released their own studies.

Yet, it was this laissez-faire approach to historical remembrance that sealed Spain’s fate. The increasingly tolerant climate of the 1970s gave rise to a new generation of historians who treated their scholarship as a form of protest against Francoism. Carolyn Boyd writes that these historians “dispense[d] with the myth of collective responsibility that had facilitated the transition” and aimed to “rescue the Second Republic from the infamy into which it had been cast by Franquist historiography…” Accordingly, later academics cast Franco’s military uprising—as opposed to the eruption of violence under the left-wing Popular Front government—as the proximate cause of the Civil War, and the ensuing dictatorship was seen as a deviation from Spain’s otherwise inevitable path to democratic modernity.

Academics cast Franco’s military uprising—as opposed to the eruption of violence under the left-wing Popular Front government—as the proximate cause of the Civil War, and the ensuing dictatorship was seen as a deviation from Spain’s otherwise inevitable path to democratic modernity.

Such perspectives repudiate the transitional covenant, which sought reconciliation by refusing to single out a particular side of the political spectrum as the sole villain in Spain’s historical catastrophe. The left also called for state intervention in historical debates under the color of promoting “democratic values.” The transition would otherwise be incomplete.

Indeed, some intellectuals increasingly complained of a “democratic deficit” that allegedly breeds “authoritarianism and apathy” among the Spanish public. In the words of Madrid-based professor Vicenç Navarro, “There cannot be an authentically democratic culture in Spain until there is an antifranquist culture, for which we need a vivid historical memory.” Put differently, democracy is “antifranquist culture,” one that must be imposed on the population lest they fail to appreciate its blessings.

Education was to play a major part in the left’s undoing of the “Pact of Forgetting.” In 1990, the Socialist government passed the General Organic Law of the Educational System (LOGSE). Students were to be taught “the plurality of perceptions and interpretations of the same social historical reality.” While pre-LOGSE textbooks portrayed Spain as having undergone a “difficult modernization” hampered by extremism on both the left and right, post-LOGSE textbooks focused heavily on the Franco era and “explain[ed] the origins, evolution, and significance of the dictatorship in terms of the relations of power in Spanish society,” an approach consistent with the Marxist and structuralist habits of New Left historical analysis. The litany of injustices to be uncovered soon came to include narratives that prioritized a unified Spain over “peripheral nationalisms.” Progressive publishers attacked the Spanish state for its repression of culturally distinct regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country. Some outright pushed separatist messages. A June 2000 report from the Real Academia de La Historia (“Royal Academy of History,” RAH) described history textbooks used by many Basque schools as “partial and biased in content, inspired in [regional] nationalist ideas … that exclude everything that might signify common ties.”

LOGSE elicited a reaction from the center-right government of José María Aznar, which came to power in the 1996 general election. Then Minister of Education and Culture Esperanza Aguirre, a member of Aznar’s People’s Party (PP), criticized the “astonishing cornering” of history by educators.

In December 1997, Aguirre released her Plan to Improve the Teaching of Humanities, which would “establish some minimum contents, common to the entire State, in language, literature, geography and history…” School curricula would restore the balance between premodern and modern history and emphasize “the unitary character of Spain’s historical trajectory.” The left reacted with cries of authoritarianism. Former communist Jordi Solé Tura wrote that “the government that is now trying to regulate knowledge of history has its roots in one of the darkest sides of that same history.” When the PP later justified its education policies by citing the 2000 RAH report on regional textbooks, Catalan nationalist parties called it “a further step towards the xenophobic, nationalist and españolista vortex.”

The left’s appeal to tolerance and pluralism has masked an obvious desire to impose its own version of history to the exclusion of other accounts. As historian José Álvarez Junco notes, what was really at stake in the debates over LOGSE was “control of the myths upon which the legitimacy of our institutions is based.” Teaching students to “critically evaluate the realities of the contemporary world” was but a means to discredit existing historical narratives, paving the way for new ones to be installed.

In fact, the decades since the 1990s have shown that left-wing politicians and intellectuals fully embrace the practice of state-sponsored “memory,” which most historians understand to be the construction of an imagined past for the sake of promoting contemporary aims. Opposition to the PP’s education reforms stems not from fundamental disagreement about shared memory but from the ideological use of what is presented as memory.

To understand the left’s position, it is useful to mention Gavriel Rosenfeld’s concept of “illiberal memory.” Rosenfeld, an American cultural critic, warns against memories that “avoid fully confronting, and accepting guilt for, past misdeeds in the name of fostering a putative sense of national unity.” Rosenfeld does not acknowledge that there can be legitimate reasons why a society may wish to move on from the past, at least at the public level. Nor does he explain why confronting past injustices should necessarily lead to “accepting guilt for” them.

Rosenfeld has no problem laying into those who do not share his obviously leftist politics. Commenting on a 2011 sculpture dedicated to Jewish refugees who were denied entry to Canada on the eve of World War II, Rosenfeld and his colleague, Janet Ward, claim that the “cogs [that] conspired to prevent the refugees on board the SS St. Louis from disembarking in Halifax … in 1939” still “turn the wheels of hatred, racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism today.” To overcome these sins means resisting “democracy-destabilizing” threats, the chief of which is supposedly U.S. President Donald Trump.

Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain since 2018, has resorted to similar rhetoric to defend his own historical memory measures. Confronting German politician Manfred Weber over his support for the PP, Sánchez asked if he would “return the names of the leaders of the Third Reich to the streets and squares of Berlin.” Echoing Rosenfeld, Sánchez reminded Weber that “the extreme right…threatens democracy, silences the media, slows down the ecological transition, [and] puts women’s rights in check.”

To the Spanish left and its foreign counterparts, the political right is guilty by association of past injustices, against which “memory” serves to inoculate society. Historian Stanley Payne critiqued the left’s view of history in this summary:

History is a political show-trial, little more than a record of heroes and villains. Its major function is to unmask oppressors, separating past generations into victims to be affirmed and sanctified and victimizers to be silenced and demonized. It projects guilt onto scapegoats of the past, especially if they can somehow be identified with political opponents in the present. The dead are not allowed to rest in peace but are enlisted in the undying struggle between good and evil.

As Spain entered the 21st century, Payne’s characterizations have proven to be accurate.

Aside from a 2002 parliamentary resolution condemning Franco and expressing condolence for victims of the Spanish right, the early 2000s produced few occasions in which the Spanish state tried to enforce ideologically driven historical positions. The situation changed when the PSOE and its allies returned to power. In September 2004, the newly formed government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero created a commission tasked with devising programs to offer victims of Francoism “proper moral recognition.” Its efforts culminated in the passage of the 2007 Historical Memory Law (LMH).

LMH proclaimed “the right of all citizens for ‘moral reparation’ and the recovery of their personal and family memory,” as well as the “radically unjust nature of all convictions, sanctions and any form of personal violence produced for political, ideological or religious reasons during the Civil War, as well as those suffered for the same reasons during the Dictatorship.”

Some of the one-time combatants appear to be more revered by the LMH than others. It called upon Spain’s democratic government to honor “those who at different times fought in defence of democratic values, such as the members of the Carabineros Corps, the international brigadiers, [and] the guerrilla fighters.” A compensation scheme was set up to benefit “persons who died in defence of democracy.” Veterans of the International Brigades were even allowed to apply for Spanish citizenship without having to renounce their existing citizenship. The inclusion of these forces among the designated martyrs for democracy—along with the exclusion of nationalists—cements a vision whereby modern Spain’s liberties were exclusively the work of left-wing revolutionaries.

Besides violating its stated promise that “It is not the task of the legislator to implement a certain collective memory,” the LMH also pushed a message that is itself highly contentious. Republican forces killed up to 20,000 Catholics in the Civil War, including 13 bishops and 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns. In some dioceses, as much as 88 percent of the clergy perished, and around 20,000 out of 42,000 churches in Spain were damaged or destroyed.

The International Brigades backing the Republican forces were organized by the Soviet-backed Communist International (Comintern) and had engaged in the suppression of Trotskyists and other groups, inconvenient truths that were captured by British author George Orwell in his 1938 book Homage to Catalonia. Orwell, a fighter in the anti-Stalin Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militia, recalls the NKVD-controlled police arresting foreigners with “doubtful political records,” creating a “horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men.”

The LMH’s collective exaltation of leftist militants whitewashes the crimes they committed not only against their enemies but also against each other, substituting genuine history for a “memory” that presents the Republicans as a united front fighting for democracy.

Despite its dogmatic authorization of leftist narratives, the LMH failed to deliver some of the left’s core demands. It outsourced the exhumation of victims to civil society groups, which were to be offered government subsidies. The UN criticized the policy as “privatization.” After winning the 2011 general election, the PP cut funding for projects under the LMH, causing exhumation teams to rely on private donations.

Moreover, the 1977 Amnesty Law remained intact. Its strength was on full display when a 2008 investigation into Franco-era crimes opened by Baltasar Garzón, a judge in the Audiencia Nacional (“National Court”), was shut down after a complaint from the trade union called Manos Limpias (“Clean Hands”). Garzón later faced disciplinary proceedings before the Supreme Court of Spain.

Meanwhile, efforts to erase Francoist symbols, required by the LMH, proceeded quite slowly—the last statue of Francisco Franco being taken down only in 2021. The Valley of the Fallen, a Catholic basilica and monument built by Franco, still attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, notwithstanding its closure from 2009 to 2011 and the shocking removal of Franco’s remains in 2019.

With progress having stalled at the national level, regional governments began to take matters into their own hands. A prominent example of this development occurred in the autonomous community of Andalusia. In May 2017, the Andalusian parliament, then controlled by a left-wing majority led by the PSOE, passed its own Law on Historical and Democratic Memory in Andalusia (LMHDA). Going further than the 2007 LMH, the LMHDA made the state directly responsible for exhumations and created a DNA bank to identify victims of the Spanish right. The LMHDA also doubled down on its predecessor’s progressive messaging, denouncing Francoism as a “crime against humanity.” It finally called for the repeal of laws that contradict “international norms” regarding the prosecution of crimes against humanity, which was a thinly veiled attack on the 1977 Amnesty.

In obedience to the new religion of intersectionality, the LMHDA expanded the definition of victims to include ethnic minorities, “feminists,” and persons who “suffered repression for their sexual orientation.” The LMH at least recognized “the radically unjust nature of all convictions, sanctions and any form of personal violence produced for political, ideological or religious reasons during the Civil War, as well as … during the Dictatorship.” Not at all surprisingly, the LMHDA features no language that honors victims of left-wing persecution.

After all, if Franco’s regime is deemed criminal, so are all those who died fighting for it. Their legacies are so “contrary to historical and democratic memory” that the LMHDA ordered the removal of even privately maintained Francoist monuments as long as they “project themselves into public space.” No equivalent ban applies to left-wing symbols, many of which represent violent, murderous ideologies. Marinaleda, a municipality in Andalusia, which has been described by one journalist as a “communist utopia” because of its highly collectivized agrarian economy, regularly displays murals depicting the hammer and sickle, the Republican tricolor flag, and Latin American Marxist Che Guevara. In contrast, there can be no excuse “for artistic or architectural reasons for exalting the Dictatorship” unless judged otherwise by the state. Noncompliance may bring fines of up to €10,000 (US$10,900).

This one-sided restriction on freedom of speech recalls Herbert Marcuse’s notion of a “liberating tolerance.” In his 1965 book A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse laments the practice of “nonpartisan tolerance,” defined as “the active, official tolerance granted to the right as well as to the left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.” By tolerating repression, which Marcuse identifies solely with the right, the ostensibly neutral state subverts the conditions for liberty. A true tolerance that would “enlarge the range and content of freedom” would thus have to be “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo,” the vetting of permissible speech and conduct being presided over by a “dictatorship of intellectuals.”

In Spain, Marcusan “liberating tolerance” comes in the form of what Vicenç Navarro calls “antifranquist culture,” without which “there cannot be an authentically democratic culture…”

The LMHDA arrived on the eve of a right-wing resurgence. The December 2018 regional election saw a coalition between the PP and the conservative Ciudadanos (“Citizens”) Party take power, ending 36 years of uninterrupted socialist rule in Andalusia. Vox, known for its hardline opposition to immigration, abortion, and gender-based policies, won 12 seats—which was the first time the party gained any representation since its founding in 2013. The PP-Ciudadanos government has been slow to conduct exhumations and process applications for new historical memory sites. Most controversial, however, was its decision to draw up a replacement for the LMHDA.

The proposed Concord Law, released in 2021, would require the state to “equal in treatment the historical periods of the Second Republic, the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship” and “respect the feelings of citizens about the events that they themselves may have experienced or that have been transmitted to them…” It would also suspend the Council of Historical and Democratic Memory, an advisory body created by the LMHDA consisting almost exclusively of progressive activist groups.

Although the Concord Law failed to pass, Vox announced in November 2022 that it would pursue a new Reconciliation Law. Like its predecessor, the law would “honor all Spaniards who, on any side or situation, fought or committed themselves for a Spain that they considered better according to their conscience…” Respect for victims “must be developed without addressing the question of the legitimacy of the regimes, which are all, without exception, part of [Spain’s] national history.” Since 2022, Vox has been pushing for a similar law in the autonomous community of Castile and León, where it is in coalition with the PP.

Faced with the right’s advances, the left once again invoked the struggle between democracy and fascism. One group of scholars called Vox “the first major and electorally successful populist radical right-wing party to emerge in Spain since the death of General Franco.” Others were more explicit in their allusions to the dictatorship. Former President of Andalusia Susana Díaz attacked Vox as the “heirs of the Franco regime.”

In January 2019, protests broke out in more than 100 municipalities across Spain. In Seville, 3,000 people chanted “Fascists out of our Parliament” and held a banner that read “PP, Ciudadanos and Vox: españolistas, sexists, and Francoists. They shall not pass.” The phrase “they shall not pass,” first used by the French in World War I, is most often associated in Spain with the communist Dolores Ibárruri, who turned it into a rallying cry during the Republican defense of Madrid in 1936. Given Ibárruri’s status as a woman, historian Andrea Hepworth praised the mostly female protestors’ appropriation of her as a form of “memory activism” that “challenge[s] those social … norms and power relations that often remain invisible in a society.”

Hepworth’s comments point to a wider tendency on the left to treat historical memory as a tool to advance their causes by manipulating the past. Because Franco promoted nationalism and traditional family values, opposing policies favoring abortion, immigration, and racial and gender identity politics have all become supposedly indispensable for democracy. Historical memory thus transforms otherwise debatable policy positions into nonnegotiable “human rights,” which in turn generate social programs to be implemented by the state and activist networks. Even if a majority of the population rejects these demands, they are to be imposed anyway because their rejection amounts to a rejection of democracy. Those who oppose these supposed markers of “democracy” are to be denounced as “Francoist” or “fascist.”

Rarely, if ever, do the wielders of these terms specify why Franco qualifies as a fascist in the proper sense, a question that has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. Nor do they explain why having an ideologically neutral approach to honoring victims is the same as endorsing fascism. For that matter, why is it fascist to oppose “feminism” when the latest iterations of feminism are considered controversial even in Western countries without a Francoist history of authoritarian rule?

These logical problems are beside the point since contemporary leftist ideologues are not concerned with rational discourse. “[Fascism] has become such a popular epithet in part because its association with Hitler and the Holocaust gives it a special imprecatory power,” historian Stanley Payne wrote. “It denotes something not merely bad or violent, but positively demonic … and is all the more useful in the twenty-first century as progressivist politics more and more adopts a redemptive and salvific tone…”

When the Socialist government of Prime Minister Sánchez passed the Democratic Memory Law (LMD) in October 2022, his supporters hailed it as “the most ambitious national law ever to deal with … Francoist repression.” While largely identical to the LMHDA in its treatment of victims, the LMD introduced punitive measures against “symbols, elements, and acts contrary to democratic memory” that were unprecedented in their harshness.

Public and private displays of Francoist symbols were banned by the LMD, with noncompliance leading to a fine of between €200 and €1,000 (US$215 to US$1,100) every month for up to 10 months. All public acts and speech that “discredit, disparage, or humiliate the victims or their families” were also banned. Those found liable will be fined an astonishing €10,001 to €150,000 (US$11,000 to US$165,000).

Finally, organizations that supposedly incite “hatred and violence” against victims were dissolved. The only such entity named is the Foundation of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen, which administers the memorial complex and funds the Benedictine monks living in the basilica. According to media reports, the Francisco Franco National Foundation is targeted by the new law as well.

Nowhere does the LMD define the meaning of terms like “discredit,” “humiliate,” or “inciting hatred.” This vagueness has prompted non-leftist scholars to warn of the chilling effect of such political instructions on historical research, especially research that uncovers information that is offensive to state-designated victim groups. The LMD demonstrates that democracy, as understood by the left, will not protect anyone’s rights to free speech and association.

The implementation of historical memory in Spain should serve as a cautionary tale for all nations. State institutions become tools for promulgating partisan narratives and suppressing dissent. Constituents of one political faction are conferred official victimhood status and given access to exclusive benefits. Their opponents, meanwhile, are branded as imminent threats to democracy. In this victory of Orwellian newspeak, the progressive left can make democracy mean whatever it wants.

In the novel Children of Dune, Frank Herbert writes: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” In its treatment of Franco’s legacy, the post-transition Spanish left has acted according to this standard.