‘Total Victory’ and the Unexpected Alternatives to Extermination

Since its very early days, the war following the failed coup d’état of July 1936 produced on both contending sides a discourse on national liberation that, relying on an inherited language on the ‘two Spains’, represented the enemy as the embodiment of an immoral Anti-Spain. Yet on the side of Franco's Alzamiento Nacional, the struggle against the Republic was also declared a Crusade.Reference Reig Tapia⁵ Inextricably fused with other radically modern ideological notions, this version of discourse on ‘political religion’ produced a distinctive representation of the enemy different from what happened in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy: instead of imagining an abstract external or a marginalized inner threat, it targeted a concrete yet quite diffused ‘Other’ encompassing a significant part of the Spanish society of the 1930s.Reference Gentile⁶ Along with it came a whole anthropology of sheer dehumanization: enemies were represented as not properly human, but as incarnations of Evil unleashing a final battle on Earth in which victory and defeat had to be total.Reference Ribeiro de Meneses⁷

Literally interpreted, the emergent referent of total victory implied the actual physical extermination of all enemies. As the war advanced, though, in territories under Franco's military control killings became systematic but also more selective, focusing on local leaders, intellectuals and those most committed to the cause of the Republic. For survivors, the only alternative discursively envisaged was relinquishing their values and identities. By this semantic recoding of extermination into conversion, an image of the defeated as essentially erring and guilty was to inform the whole approach to the overcoming of the violence of 1936–1939 during most of the Franco era, from the recognition of victims and reparations to the punishment and retaliation of the defeated, instituting actually a deep divide in the social recognition of subjects.

Right after the end of the war, in December 1939, Franco synthesized the basics of the new regime of memory by declaring that ‘the liquidation [of hatreds, passions and residues of the war] must not be done in the liberal way: no monstrous, disastrous amnesties; they entail deception rather than forgiveness. It must be Christian: the redemption by work, repentance, penance’. According to estimates, by June 1939 there were around 270,000 prisoners jammed into overpopulated jails, where they could be arbitrarily harassed and tortured for months before trial; over 50,000 of them would be executed in the next two years. By 1942 there were still over 240,000 prisoners held in prisons, over 7000 already awaiting execution. Over 3000 of those would redeem punishment through forced labour, or see their punishments commuted to life-long jail terms.Reference Cazorla-Sánchez⁸

Extermination was thus, in practice, re-semanticized not so much as conversion but as repression, expanding well into the macro-political political level. Aside from the democratic constitution and its parliamentary system, classed-based unions, political parties, civil associations, cultural and sports organizations regarded as sympathetic to revolutionary, democratic, even liberal ideals were declared illegal, their assets confiscated and their members harassed when not detained. Books, propaganda, journals were impounded, and their publishing companies closed down.Reference Álvaro Dueñas⁹ Street names were changed, certain words even disappeared from official usage. In sum, a fully-fledged process of damnatio memoriae of the republican and liberal pasts was enacted. Sympathisers of the extinguished constitutional regime and their families and heirs were stigmatized as ‘rojos’ [Reds], a term applied not only to socialists, communists or anarchists, but to all kinds of individuals suspected of not being fully committed to the regime. Such labelling underpinned policies of exclusion and everyday terrorizing.Reference Sevillano Calero¹⁰

On the opposite side, victims of pro-Republican violence were officially declared heroes and conceived of as ‘Fallen’ on the battlefield, which was itself depicted as a place where a supernatural fight of transcendental consequence had occurred.Reference Castro Berojo¹¹ They were reburied in cemeteries and given honours, their families finding relief symbolically in public acts of homage as much as economically through pensions, office holding or jobs in the several monopolies taken over by the New State.Reference Box¹²

In spite of such extremely opposite treatment, both heroes and surviving evildoers had something in common: they had been saved by the National Movement. Thus, once instituted, total victory did not leave space for public expressions of trauma or for victimization, not even on the side of the winners; conceived of as absolute, victory amounted to the definitive overcoming of war and its violence, and this included in principle all emotional sequels. Reconciliation was absolutely out of question: victory had brought about the overcoming not just of the War of Liberation against the anti-Spain, but of the whole inherited language of the ‘two Spains’.Reference Juliá¹³

In reality, however, the end of the war exacerbated struggles among different ideological sensibilities and political organizations within the winning coalition, resulting in changes in their degree of political leverage that affected the practical realization of policies on memory.Reference Saz¹⁴ In particular, the increasingly subordinated position within the scheme of the New State of Falange, the pro-fascist party created during the Republic, placed some of its members at a crossroads in their ‘working towards the Caudillo’, encouraging the outline of discursive experimentation around the meaning of total victory.Reference Saz¹⁵

As a reaction against the increasingly pragmatic approach to the post-1939 settlement, already in 1942 contributors to a journal staffed by the elite of fascist intellectuals – Escorial – declared a desire to open its pages to those, both inside Spain or in exile, who ‘having collaborated with the defeated, [are] determined to […] walk towards incorporation with the winners’. The goal was not altruistic or founded on tolerance: rather, it expressed commitment to an ambition for total conversion of the enemy springing from an organic image of the nation.Reference Juliá¹⁶ Such rhetoric, however, somehow rehabilitated the defeated as candidates for membership in a re-united community projected towards the future; moreover, the call for fulfilling the national destiny implied that the roots and sequels of violence had not been overcome by the military victory of 1939.Reference Díaz¹⁷

The defeat of this alternative helped fix an orthodox version of total victory at the service of state policies. The main goal of these consisted in recurrently bringing victory back into the present by means of regular commemoration. At the level of discursive genres, whereas memory was given a most relevant status, a history of the war properly speaking did not quite fit in. Actually, interpretations of the origins, causes and episodes of the war did not seek scientific truth but rather moral consistency with the principles of the Movimiento.Reference Pasamar¹⁸ This provided for self-consciously mythical, if not outright distorted, official narratives in which victims on the side of the enemy were presented as executioners of their own followers, as in the case of the bombing of Guernica, attributed to fleeing republican Basque soldiers. The other relevant role of total victory was socializing a representation of violence as forever overcome; this entailed, however, setting aside from public sight images of the disorder that had justified Franco's upheaval and inserting into discourse of a language alternative to Victory: that of Peace, more neutral regarding the defeated.Reference Aguilar¹⁹

In all, as Franco's regime became more of a conventional dictatorship, the memory of the defeated, whenever it could be rooted in stable communities of remembrance, was able to survive due to the limits of the instituted regime of memory for either incorporating or eradicating it. Very much diversified according to ideologies, it remained circumscribed to clandestine and private realms, and so in general unable to develop into fully-fledged narratives.

‘Collective Error and Shared Guilt’, or the Endurance of Non-public Recognition

In 1956, the leaders of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in exile issued a declaration ‘for national reconciliation, and for a peaceful and democratic solution to the Spanish problem’ in which they urged the ‘bur[ial of] the hatreds and resentments from the civil war’ by assuming the ‘hard and terrible lesson of the war and the fascist period’, and committed to ‘open[ing] to a new era of civil peace’ capable of overcoming forever confrontation among Spaniards.²⁰ The differences with the discourse offered in Escorial were marked, yet the assumption that the war had not ended endemic violence, and the common reference to inherited divisions between the ‘two Spains’ still waiting to be overcome, show parallel evolutions inside and outside the country.

The context was now riper for more successful diffusion: while the PCE was expanding its clandestine networks inside the working class, the first manifestations of an independent student movement partially inspired by ex-collaborators of Escorial already in 1956 openly criticised a ‘regime that has been unable of integrating us, projecting us towards a common future and reconcile us with Spain and ourselves’.Reference Muñoz Soro²¹ A rhetoric of recognition as the ‘sons of the winners and of the losers’ was also enacted by the emerging political agents involved in this protest.

Within a few years there took shape an elaborated discourse on the memory of the recent past. Its core referent was the idea of ‘collective error and shared guilt’: both sides in the war were to be judged as equally responsible of resorting to irrational violence and mutual destruction; the war was a terrible event of which there could be no positive vindication, and to persist in trying to establish differences between the behaviour of each side could only end up in reopening the conflict.Reference Juliá²²

The new discourse drew upon the anthropology of error and guilt, extending it to both sides fighting in the war. This enabled a rhetoric calling for the mutual cancelling out of responsibilities by allocating blame collectively to the two combating groups. Innovative as it was, this reorientation was, however, embedded in a traditional and vernacular Catholic language: it represented old enemies as ‘brothers’ who, once reintegrated into the national ‘family’ of the nation, could legitimately demand the right to political citizenship. In sum, renewed demands for democracy were moulded in a language alien to the semantics of modern citizenship.

Literally taken, though, collective error and shared guilt equated the overcoming of the war with the neglect of attributing any value to the recent past; the narratives thus engendered weakened the possibility of developing an alternative framework for addressing the recent past capable of challenging the hegemony of the instituted regime of memory. In a context where state policies were reluctant to address the origins of Victory as History, such a dilemma placed foreign historians in a crucial position. Foreign experts could elaborate narratives moulded in the language of their national liberal-democratic political cultures, and present them as unbiased according to the deontological principles of objectivity already established in their academic cultures, and neutral due to their foreign nationality.Reference Faber²³

The contribution of historians from within as well as outside of Spain was essential for consolidating the status of the oppositionist discourse on overcoming the civil war by means of reconciliation. Their narratives furnished critically scrutinized and previously unavailable information; moreover, they offered a degree of interpretative pluralism based on the authors’ ideological inclinations. They were to quickly succeed in renaming the violent past of the late 1930s as the ‘Spanish Civil War’. The new literature, however, fell short of fulfilling the goal of learning from the past: from the early 1960s onwards, all books about the dramatic events of the 1930s opened and closed with the commitment that ‘never again’ would there be a civil war, but this only amounted to a generic and rhetorical stance.

This was a sign that the new supply of narrative was quickly acquiring the shape of a savoir/pouvoir technology. Its power dimension lay first in the ability to present the events from the 1930s as past, thus contributing to downplaying the status of alternative sources of narratives, particularly those elaborated by reference to collective patterns of remembrance. In the meantime, these were actually being completely reshaped because of the structural social and cultural transformations fostered by development plan.²⁴ In such a context, the new narrative was able to create its own audience, especially among the expanding literate and urban middle class readership. In particular, the identity of the Spanish ′68 generation would become thoroughly moulded in the language of reconciliation and the rhetoric of ‘never again’, which became not only a collective moral referent but also a source of interpretive resources for political awareness.²⁵

The diffusion of this whole discourse took place, however, within an authoritarian and repressive regime that promoted a thoroughly depoliticized public sphere where individualist, consumerist values coexisted with intolerant, paternalistic moral control.Reference Cazorla-Sánchez²⁶ This affected also the younger generations, who transferred to their political experience patterns of behaviour socialized by means of an education inimical to civic principles and democratic procedures. The new narrative adapted to this cultural context: the call for scientific objectivity and neutrality was recoded in the form of knowledge of the past as irrefutable and definitive, with the double effect of setting limits to freedom of interpretation within the new communities of memory and fostering orthodox approaches to the origins of the war fit for the sectarian outlooks of the clandestine organizations burgeoning in opposition circles.Reference Sánchez León²⁷

Although much of the new discourse represented an open challenge to the semantics of total victory, the dictatorship could profit from both the available terminology of peace and the Catholic overtones of reconciliation in order to appropriate and partially re-semanticize it. Coinciding with the celebration of ‘25 years of peace’ in 1964, a massive propaganda program was deployed in which state elites put forward a concurring definition of reconciliation focused on the fruits of sustained economic growth as a fulfilled expression of the final overcoming of all divisions among Spaniards.Reference Aguilar²⁸ In response to the diffusion of new narratives, the dictatorship also created its own centre for the study of the war in 1966, where official historians, declaring the same commitment to scientific objectivity and neutrality as their non-official counterparts, tried to discredit as propaganda alternative interpretations and accounts of events of the war. In sum, pro-development bureaucrats helped diffuse the language of reconciliation throughout society.

This process shows the relative autonomy of regimes of memory from the sources of legitimacy they help produce and reproduce. Franco's regime could anyway never relinquish completely the language of Victory, and this gave the rhetorical advantage to the alternative discourse, from the vantage point of which the opposition could accuse the authorities of not taking any measures for a ‘real’ reconciliation.

With the death of Franco, the reclamation of oblivion became common ground for the encounter between old and new political elites, both those with and those without power, fostering an instrumental use of the referents from the discourse on reconciliation. After the first general elections of 1977, an agreement between Socialist, Communist and ex-Francoist elites paved the way for an amnesty law that emptied the jails; by putting into practice the rhetoric of the cancelling out of responsibilities, the opposition renounced the prosecution of crimes committed by state servants throughout the previous 40 years.Reference Aguilar²⁹ The idea of collective error was also to play an essential role in the parliamentary debates for the elaboration of the 1978 Constitution. The political elites put into practice the claim of learning the lessons of the dramatic past: the core institutional setting of the post-Franco parliamentary system was devised by means of a constant reference to the negative experience of the 1930s.Reference Aguilar³⁰

In sum, a discourse elaborated within the cultural framework of the dictatorship became the regime of memory in post-Franco's Spain. As opposed to total victory, this one gave legitimacy to trauma and other emotional dimensions of the memory of the war, but restricted their bearings to private and individual dimensions. The state did take responsibility for the unjust treatment of persons during the 1936–1939 war, but restricted it to economic compensation limited to individual members of particular groupings, especially old military fighters from the army of the Republic. Showing a lack of distance from the nature and degree of repression under the dictatorship, victims of injustice from after the war were ignored. Recoded as public oblivion, reconciliation was never performed in the public sphere, fostering a non-civic approach to the social management of the traumatic legacies from the violent past.

The only concern about the unwanted public effects of the post-Franco period was for the kind of narratives diffused during the dictatorship by official propaganda. Not much direct involvement on the part of the state was, however, required for this goal, for the status of historiography was well established by then, not only over non-documented myths but also over all other kinds of narratives, especially those founded on memory. Academic historiography thus became the hallmark of the post-Francoist overall settlement about the violent past even when it did not represent the bulk of the quite abundant literature on the issue. There was only one imposed limitation to the hegemony of the genre, though: the democratic state had to avoid upholding an official interpretation of the war, for this would imply instituting an irrevocable and detailed judgement over all the responsibilities incurred by each combating side, an option openly contradictory with instituted oblivion and with the generic and collective approach to blaming.

An overall consensus among experts on the possibility of a scientific approach to the study of the violent past allowed the recoding of subjective, ideological bias as interpretive diversity. In the epistemology underlying conventional accounts of the war, however, neutrality was reduced to balancing the distribution of guilt among the contenders in the war, whereas objectivity was equated with supplying archival information understood as conclusive. As a whole, academic production did neither promote original researching nor embed debating. By 1986, around the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the aggregated efforts of a whole generation of historians were already producing the sensation that the topic was well-enough documented and narrated, and that, as expressed by an expert, overall ‘agreement has been reached in the most relevant aspects’.Reference Sánchez León³¹ Regarded from the side of the supply of both policies and narratives the war seemed to be overcome.

‘Instituted Remembrance’: An Alternative Regime of Memory in the Making

In spite of the apparent settlement, throughout the 1980s and beyond polls kept showing that the memory of the traumatic past endured among large proportions of Spanish citizens, divided between collective patterns that went back to the social cleavages of the 1930s.Reference Aguilar and Humlebaek³² This unexpected side-effect was in fact potentially embedded in the very logics of the discourse on collective error and shared guilt, for it could not totally undermine social activities of remembrance. The massive production of literature on the Spanish Civil War already available by the late 1970s could nurture unintended developments.

Already during the transition, the return of exiles and the ambience of social mobilization fuelled by institutional change and democratization inspired political activities that took a stance for remembering. In particular, there took place exhumations of abandoned corpses of civilians killed during and after the war. Initiatives like these had a strictly local dimension, though, so that due to disinterest on the part of political elites or limited access to media, they waned after the victory of the social-democrats in 1982.³³

Twenty years later, however, changes in the national and international context paved the way for their re-appropriation. The expansion of the paradigm of Human Rights in the post-Cold War global settlement, together with the crisis in the traditional overarching ideologies, brought about an emerging concern for the moral costs of modernization, especially in re-established democracies. Inside Spain, the decline of the social-democrat majorities amidst accusations of corruption and the subsequent aggressive neoliberal policies of the conservatives triggered critical revisions of the transition to democracy. Around 2000, while the conservatives in power endorsed a ‘revisionist’ literature divulging interpretations of the war which, mimicking those of the Franco period, blamed ‘the Left’ for the outbreak of the civil war, newspapers in the centre-left opened their pages to information about new exhumations, effected by civil society organizations, of civilians massacred during the war.Reference Cenarro³⁴

In the wake of these trends, a whole range of literature, in the form of testimonies, essays and fictional approaches to the violence of the war and the dictatorship, flooded the market.Reference Labanyi³⁵ Within a few years, the ambience created around the issue of the already so-called, ‘recovery of historical memory’ had amounted to a fully-fledged social movement capable of elaborating and diffusing discourse. Behind the claim for a reorientation in policies of memory was the struggle for recognition of an emerging identity partially staffed by youngsters who are actually ‘sons of the transition’ to democracy, but many of which prefer to be labelled as ‘grandsons of the defenders of the Republic’.

The core of this discourse revolves around an approach to the violent past as ‘instituted remembrance’. Its basic content is that victims, for long ignored, need to be given recognition.Reference Labanyi³⁶ Literally taken, the claim restricts itself to finding out, exhuming and burying in proper cemeteries the corpses of civilians – which according to estimates amount to over 100,000 – killed by the pro-Franco followers and dug into graves scattered throughout the country. Yet the lack of interest and eventually of endorsement and involvement on the part of state authorities has fostered a widening of scope and scale that transcends the limits of the regime of collective error and shared guilt. Openly denouncing a ‘pact of oblivion’ imposed during the transition, participants in the movement have jumped towards claiming for the derogation of the pre-constitutional amnesty law on 1977 in order to charge responsibilities for the injustices occurred under Franco.Reference Davis³⁷

The movement for memory has been successful in questioning the instituted regime due to its lack of sensibility and concern for the public dimension of trauma. By arguing that, while pro-Francoist victims were honoured for decades, pro-Republican victims have been neglected both under the dictatorship and democracy, it signals that equal treatment to both contending sides is not upheld in practice. The other core referent of the instituted regime of memory is also being challenged. Considering the civil war a collective error, the hegemonic discourse has fostered accounts of the 1930s, stressing its negative aspects. Instead, the impressive development of cultural products relating to the war and the post-war period diffused in the last few years overwhelmingly incorporates a much more sympathetic interpretation of the achievements of the Republic.

This shift actually affects the dramatis personae of narratives about the war, with deep implications: by depicting the majority of the Spaniards of the 1930s as citizens partaking in a democratic regime, the discourse around the emerging referent of instituted memory neglects the equating of the behaviour of defenders and aggressors of the besieged Republic.

By itself, however, this does not make for an alternative regime of memory. The movement for the recovery of memory harbours indeed new semantic orientations, especially by relating the overcoming of the war not with oblivion or reconciliation but rather with the recovery of a bygone past for the purpose of honouring victims and instituting their memory as common heritage for the citizens of the twenty-first century. But such discourse is still framed in the same political culture as the currently instituted one.

The 2007 legislation reveals the influence of two different languages. In trying to strike a middle ground between the movement claims and the established tradition of lack of active implication in policies of memory by the state, the ‘Law of Historical Memory’ actually combines two different approaches to the overcoming of the Civil War and its aftermath: on one side, it assumes public concern for victims and provides indirect state initiatives, but on the other it keeps recognition, rehabilitation and compensation on an individualistic, private ground.

In the meantime, exhumations and other civil initiatives have encouraged new lines of research, often undertaken by volunteers and amateurs. This, together with the massive production of non-expert literature on the war and the dictatorship has undermined the hegemonic status of academic historiography in the supply of narratives about the violent past. The building of an alternative narrative framework suitable to the discourse of instituted remembrance nevertheless remains to be developed, in the absence of whichthere is no alternative to the currently instituted regime of memory.