Reviewed by: Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory and Rewriting Spain’s Past by Nicole Iturriaga, and: Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition by Sebastiaan Faber Omar G. Encarnación (bio) Nicole Iturriaga, Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory and Rewriting Spain’s Past (Columbia University Press, 2022), ISBN 9780231201131, 256 pages. Sebastiaan Faber, Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021), ISBN 9780826501738, 286 pages. William Faulkner’s aphorism “the past is never dead, it’s not even past” could not be more appropriate in suggesting how the past looms over contemporary Spanish politics. As Spain entered democracy in 1977, it pointedly and conveniently turned its back on the painful history of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the ensuing dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1939–75).1 The [End Page 161] most infamous chapter in this history is what historian Paul Preston has called the “Spanish Holocaust,” a killing campaign undertaken by Franco in the years following the Civil War to eradicate all left-wing influence in Spain.2 It resulted in the execution of thousands of people because of their political beliefs. Thousands more were sent to concentration and labor camps. Most of these victims were supporters of the Second Republic (1931–1936), Spain’s first real experiment with democracy and the losing side in the Civil War. “Let bygones be bygones” was the mantra of the architects of Spain’s new democracy. This overt lack of reckoning and accountability stood in striking contrast with the contemporaneous transition to democracy in Portugal and Greece, where the old regime was held to account for its political sins. In Portugal, those who had collaborated with the Salazar dictatorship were purged from their jobs in government, universities, and even businesses. Greece’s military junta regime was put on trial for a wide range of charges, including high treason and insurrection. Instead, Spain’s political elites embraced the so-called “pact of forgetting.” Contrary to what is implied in the name, the pact of forgetting did not entail actual forgetting or censorship. Rather, this informal agreement called for avoiding public policies that would rekindle the memory of the events that drove the country into a bloody carnage during the interwar years, which historians estimate cost the lives of close to one million Spaniards, and for staying clear of using the past as a weapon during political deliberations and campaigning. The pact of forgetting also encouraged Spaniards to disremember the past and to focus on the future. Driving Spain’s project of willful political amnesia following the demise of the Franco dictatorship was the desire to avoid confrontation and seek consensus while democratic institutions, including a brand-new constitution (enacted in 1978), were under construction. To that end, a newly elected Spanish parliament enacted a sweeping amnesty law in 1977 that was supported by all the major political groups, the general public, civil society organizations, and the national media. El País, a liberal newspaper, hailed the law as “the best possible of amnesties.”3 Remarkably, the pact of forgetting proved amazingly resilient, at least in the early years of the new democracy. Indeed, it appears that for many years after Franco’s death the only reason that merited talking about the past was to stress the need to not talk about it. In 1986, on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Civil War, there were no official public events to mark the occasion, save for a brief statement by Prime Minister Felipe González noting that the war’s “fratricidal character made it unsuitable for commemoration . . . the Civil War is history and no longer part of the reality of the country.”4 The two books under review in this essay document and explain in separate but complementary fashion the unraveling in recent years of the pact of forgetting, and the emergence of the memory of the past as a prominent feature in contemporary Spanish politics. More specifically, these books deal with the two major political blows to the pact of forgetting. Iturriaga’s [End Page 162] Exhuming History deals with the first and most significant blow: the Law of Historical Memory. Enacted in 2007 by the Socialist administration...
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Oct 19, 2023
Sean Donahue 
Open Access
