The Death of Franco

On November 20th, 1975, Spanish  General Francisco Franco died in bed,  
signaling the unceremonious end of one of  Europe s longest dictatorships (1939-1975). 
On October 24th, 2019, his remains were  exhumed from the state-sponsored monument,  
Valley of the Fallen. Built by the  Francoist regime during the 1940s and 1950s  
with the forced labor of thousands of political  prisoners, the Valley of the Fallen is a mass  
burial site that was designed to commemorate the  Spanish Civil War as a fratricidal conflict and  
celebrate the triumph of reconciliation. With the 2019 exhumation of the Caudillo  
(the Fascist-era title that  Franco embraced as his own),  
the Spanish government retracted support from  these timeworn narratives, paving the way toward a 
public reassessment of the legacies of Francoism. The Spanish Civil War began on July 18th,  
1936, when General Franco and other Spanish  officers from the colonial Army of Africa staged  
a failed right-wing military coup against the  democratically elected Popular Front government. 
In response to the attempted coup, loyalist  forces and popular militias rose up to defend  
the besieged republic. In turn, Nazi Germany and  Fascist Italy came to the aid of the belligerent  
officers, airlifting the Army of Africa from the  Spanish protectorate in Morocco to mainland Spain. 
Like other interwar crises across Europe, the  three-year conflict that ensued pitted those  
who wanted to preserve the hierarchies of the  pre-1914 order against those who embraced social  
and political change. The Civil War was more  than an ideological struggle between fascism  
and anti-fascism. Spain splintered during  the war as competing visions of the era s  
most pressing social questions, such as gender  relations and religion, were brought to the fore. 
During the war, Franco s so-called  Nationalist forces pursued a campaign of  
systematic extermination, with aerial bombing of  civilian populations, as in the case of Guernica;  
attacks on evacuees, as in the case of the M  laga-Almer a Road Massacre; and the summary  
execution of teachers, intellectuals, and  political opponents. By the war s end in 1939,  
350,000 Spaniards had died as a result of the  conflict and another 500,000 had fled into exile. 
In many ways, the dictatorship that ensued  was initially just as brutal. Between 1940  
and 1942, 200,000 Spaniards died because of  political repression, hunger, and disease.  
Even Spaniards living in exile continued  to suffer at the hands of the Caudillo.  
For example, during the Second  World War, Francoist officials  
sent 10,000 Spanish prisoners of war  to Nazi concentration camps in Austria. 
During the 36-year dictatorship, the Francoist  regime never abandoned its signature political  
violence. However, brutality gave  way to reform beginning in the 1950s.  
With the goal of establishing a strategic  position in the emerging Cold War order,  
the regime touted its anti-Communist credentials,  liberalized the economy, and introduced limited  
social and political reforms. At the same time, three million  
Spaniards migrated from the rural south to  the industrial north, where they broke the  
repressive bonds of postwar life and forged  new relationships in cities and factories. 
Taken together, these reforms from above  and social changes from below laid the  
foundations for the Spanish economic miracle (from  1959-1974) and subsequent political transition  
in the wake of Franco s death (from 1975-1982). Members of the former regime and its opposition  
negotiated the political transition  that followed under the supervision  
of King Juan Carlos, whom the dictator  had selected as his personal successor.  
Working together behind closed doors, these  transitional elites established a constitutional  
monarchy with a parliamentary system based on  the principles of representative democracy. 
Once hailed as a model, the Spanish transition  has come under scrutiny in recent years  
as new economic and political crises  have emerged amidst growing demands  
for the recovery of historical memory. Critics have called for the renegotiation  
of foundational pacts like the 1977 Amnesty  Law, which released political prisoners  
in exchange for prohibiting legal proceedings  against perpetrators of human rights violations.  
Although illegal under current international  regulations, Spain s Amnesty Law has remained  
in force, hindering criminal investigations and  preventing the formation of Truth Commissions,  
as was common in other post-dictatorial societies  such as Argentina, Chile, and South Africa. 
To date, the 2019 exhumation marks the state  s most definitive condemnation of Francoism.  
In 2020, Spain passed the Democratic Memory Act,  which builds on the earlier 2007 Law of Historical 
Memory and years of grassroots organizing. It  proposes to institutionalize this condemnation  
by converting the Valley of the Fallen into a  civilian cemetery, preventing publicly funded  
institutions from glorifying the dictatorship,  and organizing the exhumation and identification  
of the estimated 112,000 victims of Francoism  that are still buried in unmarked mass graves.