Spain Is Still Haunted by the History of he Civil War and Franco

Antonio Feros, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, in the NYT March 20, 2004):

While rescue crews were still picking through the rubble from the devastating explosions in Madrid last week, Spanish commentators were already making comparisons, not to 9/11, not to other terrorist attacks that had occurred in Europe over the last couple of decades but to the unrest in 1934 through 1936, the bloody period preceding the bitter Spanish Civil War.

Some on the left, for example, warned that Jose Maria Aznar's ruling center-right Popular Party was using the tactics of the Francoists and preparing a coup d'etat to prevent the Socialist Party from winning Sunday's national election. Later, critics on the right claimed that the Socialists had used illegal, antidemocratic tactics to win the vote -- as the left was accused of doing before and during the civil war. Thousands of Popular Party supporters chanted, "This is a robbery" in Madrid last Sunday night, after the results had been announced.

Regardless of the accuracy of such rumors, the fact that a 70-year-old conflict should so quickly come to mind indicates just how deeply ingrained the civil war is in the collective memory of the country and how it continues to have a profound influence on the ways Spaniards speak about national politics.

Federico Jimenez Losantos, a conservative journalist at Radio COPE and a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Aznar, said that the only precedent in the history of Spain to such violence against innocent civilians occurred in 1936, in Paracuellos del Jarama, a little town close to Madrid, "where several hundred of conservative political prisoners were executed by leftist militants." (This comment was made soon after the March 11 attacks, when many Spaniards thought the Basque Separatist group ETA was responsible.)

Just this last Wednesday, during a press conference to present his new film, Pedro Almodovar, the celebrated Spanish director, referred to rumors that blamed the Popular Party government for "planning a coup d'etat on Saturday night to prevent the victory of the Socialists."

That the civil war should remain a searing political reference point more than 25 years after democracy was established is not as odd as may at first seem. Some of Spain's main political parties, including the Socialist, the Communist and some nationalist parties, played substantial roles before and during the civil war, and analysts believe that their ideologies, tactics and goals have not changed substantially since then.

The Popular Party did not exist during the civil war, but it was originally founded in the late 1970's by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a minister of Francisco Franco during the 1960's; and on occasion it has been regarded as the offspring of Francoist ideology and tactics. Therefore, to understand the real intentions of each political party, the argument goes, one must look at what happened before and during the civil war.

Yet just what happened during that period -- when 300,000 people died in action, 400,000 were forced into exile and another 400,000 were imprisoned by Francoists during and after the war -- has become the subject of increasingly bitter dispute.

Pio Moa, a journalist and historian, is probably the best known of the recent crop of revisionists. His several books on the Republic (1931-1936) and the civil war have been enormously popular. "Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil" ("The Myths of the Civil War"), published last year, sold more than 100,000 copies in a few months. In it Mr. Moa systematically questions the main thesis accepted by a majority of Spanish historians: that Franco overthrew the democratically elected government. In the words of Stanley Payne, a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Mr. Moa disputes "the notion that leftist politics under the Republic were inherently democratic and constitutionalist and the idea that the civil war was the product of a long-standing conspiracy by wealthy reactionaries rather than a desperate response to stop a revolutionary process that had largely destroyed constitutional government."