The vision of the Spanish Civil War, a hybrid product of the two, has not changed since Georges Mosse explained the myth of the war experience in memory of the two great world conflicts in Fallen Soldiers. Above all by studying small details and elements of everyday life. Ultimately, the most routine and mundane objects and events are the ones that unconsciously help us build our vision of the world; manipulated to mask violence, Nazism’s greatest skill, we will have an entire society under our control. From the beginning of the war, death was a key element in the emergence of a new community, that of “those who have fallen from God and from Spain”. As an important pillar in defining the “authentic” nation, it expressly separated the good Spaniards from the bad. The construction of the memorials to the fallen was an early stage operation that involved the population but was controlled from start to finish by the rebel authorities. Gradually they were appointed to “national monumental ensembles”: by honoring and commemorating the fallen, they finally defined and glorified Franco’s own political figure. The memory of the war was thus absorbed by that of the Crusade, an element neither Hitler nor Mussolini ever had, as the supreme expression of national Catholicism.
Monument to the fallen in Plaza de España in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. GOVERNMENT OF THE CANARY ISLANDS (GOVERNMENT OF THE CANARY ISLANDS)
Despite the importance of the subject, there has been no monographic study of its construction, impact, and importance. At the crossroads of memory and oblivion. The Monuments to the Fallen of the Spanish Civil War (1936-2021), Miguel Ángel del Arco grips the gauntlet through a history book showing the use of these monuments in rebuilding Spanish nationalism and breaking away from the European program of mass nationalization to which the Franco regime never surrendered has shown. The coup stopped time and served to restore the old traditional order of things, enhancing the restoration with soldiers and intellectuals experienced in the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The old general was determined to bring the beach closer to his hometown of Jerez, to take the railway to places that hadn’t yet seen steam, let alone Neo-Mudejar-style stations, a symbol of his supposed authoritarian modernization. However, the Franco regime used the civil war to paralyze and reverse any program of change and reform. Instead, it fostered shared memories through common enemies that also embodied the lack of a political project: communism, democracy, liberalism, and the republic, anti-Spain for short. The memory of the war thus suffered a negative integration, the reverse of which was projected in a gigantic construction program that has survived to this day, an excellent object of study to understand our own historical and social evolution.
All provincial capitals and major cities had one. In the big cities they occupied the center and the new spaces of the wounded post-war geography. Many years later, in the final stages of Francoism, they began to receive attacks that showed the so often repeated desire to end an era by destroying their symbols. They have survived, been destroyed, painted and retouched, but they have also been restored and cared for as part of an idealized past, a sacred ensemble. The crosses and monuments of those who fell for God and for Spain still convey the strength of one of the most important founding myths of the Franco dictatorship, which kept going thanks to a funeral company that not even developmentalism could supplant.
Interior of the crypt of the Monument to the Fallen in Pamplona. Jesus Diges (EFE)
The Francoist cultural elites have carved their mentality and all that the war meant for them in granite. They created a language, a style, and some elements that the state would adopt as its own and non-negotiable. The archival work on the monuments reveals their networks from the city councils to the councils from the bottom up, but above all it shows the conflict between the Francoist administration itself and the single party. They were contested by the General Directorate of Fine Arts, which planned and managed the design, and the movement’s General Secretariat, which controlled the ceremonies and placed the monuments in the regime’s new festival calendar. Its best synthesis was the Valley of the Fallen, conceived as a national memorial to the fallen of the dictatorship, through an iconographic plan that represented all its choral elements: the rural, the sacred and the military. A major monument that wanted to link its origins to the imperial past, to Philip II and the Escorial. The caudillo was the continuator of his work. Thus, Muguruza, his architect, could not design all the great esplanades for mass scenography he had studied in Nazi Germany and, together with the sculptor Juan de Ábalos, had to concentrate on depicting the idea of the crusade “for the fallen God and for Spain” and the redeeming punishment for the vanquished. Inaugurated in 1959, the mirror image of the two Spains reemerged strongly two decades after the end of the war, a slow period of suffering for the losers as life moved on, as Spanish society increasingly looked less like coming out of the war.
The memorials also speak of the Franco regime’s efforts to fight against oblivion and keep its civil war history alive. From the 1960s onwards they faded away, while at the same time memories other than the war emerged. After the establishment of the first Democratic town halls in 1979, many were remodeled or relocated. The question of the crosses was more problematic and shows the indecisiveness and difficulties of democratic governments to put an end to this official reminder of the war. Built and praised for the dictatorship itself, it continues to testify to its model of reconciliation through the memories of just a portion of the fighters. An exclusive official memory based on a myth that no longer works, resurrected by the political polarization that puts the past and history at the center of a relentless culture war.
Crossroads of memory and oblivion. The Monuments to the Fallen of the Spanish Civil War (1936-2021), Miguel Ángel del Arco. Review, 2022. 456 pages, 24.90 euros.
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo is Full Professor of Contemporary History at Complutense University and Director of the Complutense Research Group on the Civil War and Francoism (Gigefra).
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