The Battle Over the Memory and the New Account of the Spanish Civil War

List of Abbreviations

A past that does not pass¹

The past, history and social/cultural/collective/historical memory—adjectives whose use by specialists has given rise to very diverse approaches and interpretations²—are very different realities. Neither are all past events historical, nor can collective historical memory be constructed from past events as a whole. This is so because neither is every past relevant, nor do all historical events have the capacity to project themselves on the present. Certainly, the Treaty of Tordesillas is a relevant past event and, therefore, historical. But, beyond the decisions adopted to commemorate the 500th anniversary of its signing, no one would consider it to be appropriate for determining the current state of affairs of Spanish foreign policy vis-à-vis Portugal or the current relations between the Spaniards and the Portuguese. On the other hand, the importance that all governments attach to possessing resources for orientating the social memory of a collective is evident. By the same token, the potential that a historical event has for influencing the future of a country does not depend so much on its nature as on the service that it can render to particular interests, regardless of whether they be those of the elites, corporations, collectives or society as a whole.

In the field of historical memory, not all past events end up being an object of controversy. Their nearness or distance in time can exert a certain amount of influence, but is by no means decisive. What is indeed crucial is the belief that those events can influence or determine the present and be exploited by the stakeholders for achieving certain ends. If that historical event was also traumatic and divided the entire population of a state into two warring parties, then the conditions are ripe for it to become an object of discord. For this reason, when in Spain there is talk about the ‘battle over memory’ or ‘historical memory’, ←9 | 10→reference is actually been made to the ‘historical memory’ of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Francoism and the democratic transition, which, more recently, has also become a bone of contention. The ‘other’ Spanish civil conflicts, like, for example, the Carlist Wars (1833–1876), have been excluded from the public debate. This is not because they were less traumatic or violent, not even because they are much more distant in time for the current generations—although this doubtless has something to do with it—but above all because they are not considered as having any influence on the present.

The analysis of the ‘memory’ of these periods and the strategies for leveraging it in different ‘presents’ pose a number of very different problems. These include determining which memory should be analysed and at what specific moment in the historical process that commenced back in 1936. As Maurice Halbwachs (1950) demonstrated, neither is ‘collective memory’ the same as the ‘individual’ kind, nor is ‘experiential memory’ identical to the ‘constructed’ or ‘transmitted’ kind, nor does the ‘official memory’ have to coincide with the ‘dominant’ one. Although they all coexist, they do not coincide in time or space, but are interrelated and modified by personal and social developments. Accordingly, ‘collective memory’ would be a set of shared social perceptions of the past to which a certain capacity to influence the present is attributed. In the opinion of P. Aguilar (1996: 25), who indistinctly employs the concepts of ‘collective’, ‘historical’ and ‘social’ memory, ‘it is the memory that a community has of its own history, as well as the lessons that it has more or less consciously learned from it’. In other words, ‘It includes both the content of memory (the recollection of specific historical events) and the values associated with its evocation (historical lessons and learning), often modified by the vicissitudes of the present’.3

Should this approach be correct, it would be difficult to claim the existence of a ‘collective memory’ of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism shared by successive generations from 1936 down to the present day. For instance, it is hard to find anything in common between the specific recollections and behavioural patterns, plus the lessons learned, of an upper-middle-class Galician and follower of Calvo Sotelo, who voluntarily enlisted in a Falangist unit, before returning home victorious, and those of a day-labourer of the same age hailing from Extremadura, where he had also been a local leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party⁴ (hereinafter PSOE) and the Federation of Agricultural Labourers⁵ (FNTT). Even ←10 | 11→harder if that day-labourer, whose father had been murdered by African troops, had been captured by the Nationalists, after escaping to the area under Republican control, sentenced to death and subsequently pardoned, following several years in prison and many others on probation. And all but impossible if, in the meantime, he had been forced to witness how the rest of his family were continually harassed by their neighbours, before facing new charges filed by the Regional Tribunal of Political Responsibilities6 (TRRP), and had had to cope with the incessant bombardment of Francoist propaganda which constantly reminded him of his status as one of the vanquished. Nor would a women raped and shaved by a group of Falangists for being the companion of a ‘red’ have the same memories as a Navarre traditionalist whose grandfather had died in the Carlist War of 1872. And it goes without saying that neither of these four individuals, nor three different young people aged 20, would have had the same memories in 1940, 1965 or 1978.

It is not a question of alleging that there can be no collective memory when everyone does not share the same factual memory of a specific historical episode. It is clear that ‘being social presupposes the ability to experience events that happened to groups and communities to which we belong long before we joined them, as if they were part of our past’ (Zerubavel 1996: 290). This does not, however, detract from the fact that through different forms of social engagement, such as ceremonies, rituals, commemorations, tributes and so forth, an individual who has not directly experienced a past event participates in its recreation in the shape of collective memory. Be that as it may, it is hard to admit that it can subsist when evocations of the past are so different, not to say antagonistic, and the alleged lessons and behavioural patterns that have been learned from them in the present do not coincide, even though they are susceptible to being assumed by a collective. Nor is it a question of confusing the possibility or impossibility of constructing a consensual memory with collective memory per se. Nonetheless, it is difficult to accept that the latter has some substance when its theoretical custodians, irrespective of the generation to which they belong, disagree to such an extent on its content. Consequently, if the existence of a sole collective memory is ruled out, it is impossible to infer that the lessons of the past and the attitudes and behaviours of the present are determined in a one-way fashion, whatever the historical period to which reference is being made.

Collective memory (memories) is (are) a complex cultural construct and, as such, it (they) is (are) also linked to social relationships and those of power. ←11 | 12→Memory bestows power because a multitude of links, relationships and connections of all types are built around it, some of which have to do with the very legitimacy of political authority. Insofar as it intervenes in the process of political socialisation, memory stands in the way of the perception of reality, legitimises or delegitimises discourses, fosters or breaks loyalties and, to some extent, contributes to align certain future alternatives that depend on, or are closely related to, whatever a society decides to perpetuate or silence. To practice, spawn or even invent a particular memory implies making a decision and, owing to its political dimension, taking a stance, which converts it into an essentially political act. That is why its management is so important for all kinds of regimes, particularly the undemocratic ones among their number. This is even more the case when it involves events that have not been directly experienced by different generations coexisting in the same time and space. In other words, when there is no living memory of them, which increases the danger that they might be used for vindicating a regime or an ideal, whether this be a dictatorship or the myth-making narrative of the ‘ultimate great cause’.7

Memory can be understood as a set of representations of the past that require a previous process of interpretation that interrelates the past and the present. The resulting interdependence involves a manipulation of the past by a wide range of prior determinants (values, beliefs, ideologies, interests, needs, expectations, etc.). It is obvious that collectives cannot ‘remember’ in the literal sense of the word (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995: 111), but construct their memory in a process that bears certain similarities to what occurs with individual memory. At least in the sense that in both cases there is a selective process which is updated according to the needs of each moment. Although while in the case of the latter it is a psychological process, in that of collective memory it is sociocultural processes that intervene. Additionally, whereas individual memory is preferably based on direct experiences—which does not necessarily mean that they are objective—collective memory is the result of a series of representations of the experiences of other people, which are conveyed through different mechanisms of social reproduction and which, consequently, can also influence individual memory.

‘To remember’ implies above all transporting events experienced in the past to the present, reliving them and giving them a new meaning and, to some extent, as P. Ricoeur (2003: 539 and ff.) observed, contributing with them to fight against oblivion, which would explain its relationship with the ‘duty of justice’ ←12 | 13→to which reference is often made. For this reason, all specialists single out, in addition to its constructed character, the dynamic and changing nature of cultural or collective memory and, therefore, the fact that remembering the past is a reproductive but performative act, in the sense that it is capable of creating a relationship with the past on the basis of present interests (Erll and Rigney 2009: 2). Having said that, they say that history ‘is the convening of the past from the present’, while memory ‘is the interruption of the past in today’; the former does not control ‘memory or oblivion, even though it might shape it through its narrative. History would create memory, but would not subjugate it’ (Izquierdo Martín and Díaz Freire 2020).