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50 YEARS AFTER FRANCO’S DEATH: VINDICATING DEMOCRATIC MEMORY  
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Marga Ferré
November 19, 2025
Transform!Europe
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_ The far right disputes memory in order to open up the possibility
of authoritarian government on the horizon of expectations. Our
horizon is built from a different place: the idea that fascism will
never return, ever again. _

Memorial posts for victims of the Spanish Civil War at Torrero
cemetery in Zaragoza. , Source: Chamarasca / Wikimedia Commons, CC
BY-SA 4.0

 

“Those who are condemned to repeat the past are not those who do not
remember it, but those who do not understand it.”Daniel Giglioli

This 20th of November marks 50 years since the death of dictator
Francisco Franco in Spain. On that day, Franco died in a hospital bed
as the head of state of a country he ruled with an iron fist,
authoritarian and violent, for 40 years, after winning our Civil War
with the help of Hitler and Mussolini. After the war, Franco imposed a
fascist and criminal regime that plunged my country into one of the
darkest and saddest periods in its history.

And yet, the rise of the far right today calls into question the
harshness of the regime that ravaged Spain for four decades. Today we
are beginning to hear that Francoism was not so bad, that it was not
such a big deal, that it was a soft dictatorship… we are beginning
to hear, ever louder, the narcotic whisper of the deniers. A discourse
is beginning to take hold that does not exactly defend Francoism, but
does present it as a “soft” regime and denies, minimises, or
sugarcoats the criminal and systemic nature of Franco’s repression.
It is no longer the ranting of “Viva Franco”, arms raised and blue
shirts (the shirts of the _Falange_, the Spanish version of
Mussolini’s Blackshirts). It is more subtle.

The far right is sowing doubts about the consensus that has been
reached until the whisper becomes an ordinary part of the
conversation. The dispute over memory is one of its battlegrounds (as
it is in Italy, Argentina, Hungary, and Spain), and although until now
I understood it as a denial of the criminal past of the fascisms of
which they are the heirs, the step further that this reactionary
whisper is taking seems to have another intention, which I would
summarise as follows: IF IT IS ACCEPTED THAT A DICTATORSHIP WAS NOT
SUCH A BAD THING, THE IDEA OF AN AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT BECOMES MORE
SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE. It’s that simple.

The reactionary moment in the West

One of the founding pillars of fascism in the past, and of the far
right today, is the one that links democracy with misgovernment or
corruption. Its model is what Viktor Orbán christened (and
established) in Hungary, “illiberal democracy”, a euphemism behind
which to hide an electoral autocracy. This is where the attack on
democratic memory comes in, lest younger generations really know what
fascism was, what Francoism was: blurring the memory of what an
authoritarian far-right government really means in order to make it
more acceptable.

At an event in Athens commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of
dictatorships in Spain, Greece, and Portugal, after hearing about the
epic Carnation Revolution that overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship
and the turmoil that brought down the Junta of the Colonels in Greece,
I was left thinking, and when it was my turn to talk about the Spanish
case, I could only begin with: “Well, in Spain, Franco died in his
bed,” which made the audience smile. They immediately understood
that in Spain there was no revolution, no crisis of the regime. In
Spain, the dictator died shrouded in a cloak of silence and fear so
thick that it covered up his crimes.

The facts are well known, but for those who minimise the criminal
nature of the Franco regime, it is good to remember them, vindicate
them, and continue to think about how it was possible:

between 115,000 and 130,000 disappeared; 150,000 murdered; 30,000
stolen children; 2,800 mass graves (the largest, the Valley of the
Fallen, holds the remains of more than 30,000 people); 500,000 exiles;
up to 300,000 political prisoners at the beginning of the military
regime alone. Spain is the second country in the world with the most
disappeared people in ditches. All these figures come from Judge
Garzón’s investigation, to which we can add those of Javier
Rodrigo: 188 concentration camps operated in Spain after the Civil
War; and those of Julián Casanova, who estimated that 50,000 _Reds_
were murdered between 1939 and 1946.

Read that last figure again. In her beautiful and essential essay _El
arte de invocar la memoria_ (_The Art of Invoking Memory_, 2024),
historian Esther López Barceló defines the Franco regime on the
basis of that number: “The mass executions of the early years of the
dictatorship laid the foundations for the new state.” The numbers of
Franco’s repression are only the bloody tip of the iceberg of fear
on which the dictatorship was built. It is good to remember this in
the country that never judged it.

One country that did was Argentina. Every 24 March, mass marches take
place in its cities in memory of the 30,000 people who disappeared
during the military dictatorship. Today, Milei, very much in line with
the above, reduces the number to 8,000 and downplays one of the
bloodiest repressions of the 20th century. “There are 30,000,”
shouts the crowd, in a dispute that is not about numbers, but about
futures.

In the aforementioned essay by Esther López Barceló, I find a
powerful idea that connects different ways of understanding memory.
She tells us that while in Buenos Aires, she visited ESMA, one of the
worst torture centres in the country of the disappeared: “I knew I
was in a sanctuary, in a space still heavy with the air of violence,
but I was not fully aware that I was in an area cordoned off by
forensic scientists: the scene of a crime that was and continues to be
under judicial investigation. Don’t blame me. ‘I come from the
anomaly,’ I should have told them. Spain, the scene of the perfect
crime. The one that has been hidden from us until we ignored it. Until
we believed that it didn’t happen. That it never happened. I come
from the country of the crime that didn’t happen.”

Because we know that it did, we know what happened, and we even have a
Memory Law, and yet… in the Puerta del Sol (our ESMA), there is not
a single sign of the torture, not even a plaque under the window where
we all know that Julián Grimau, the communist leader murdered by the
regime,  was thrown.

Invoking the memory that breaks them

To BREAK THE NARRATIVE THAT LINKS FRANCO’S REGIME TO A SOFT
DICTATORSHIP, it is essential to talk about democratic memory, to
recognise the fear imposed by mass graves. And the truth is that what
really breaks them, what dismantles the reactionary whisper of “it
wasn’t such a bad dictatorship”, is to do so from a place that
questions them, that points them out, that tells them from the present
that this wound still hurts us and that it is on this wound that we
want to build a future where this will never happen again.

Years ago, David Becerra dazzled me in his study _The Civil War as
Literary Fashion_ (2015) with one of his discoveries: he denounces
that for years the Civil War and Francoism have been recounted or
novelised in an ahistorical way, that is, narrated from a present
where the conflict is happily resolved, without a common thread, as if
it had nothing to do with the conflicts of the present. As if the past
and memory had no direct relationship with today and, more
importantly, with our ability to project futures.

A memory for the future

“We have to learn to build a memory of resistance,” says Enzo
Traverso, always lucid, and to do so, I think, we must bring the
defeated out of “that perfect crime that was the repression of
Francoism”, to use López Barceló’s apt words.

Using education as a tool for the future, because, as the phrase with
which I begin this article strikes home, a generation that does not
know, that is unaware, is doomed to repeat history. The far right
disputes memory in order to open up the possibility of authoritarian
government on the horizon of expectations. So let us continue to
dispute the memory of resistance from the present so that our horizon
is built from a different place: the idea that fascism will never
return, ever again.

 

_Marga Ferré is President of transform! europe and Co-President of
The Foundation for Critical Studies / Fundación de Estudios Críticos
FEC (Formerly Foundation for a Citizens’ Europe / Fundación por la
Europa de los Ciudadanos), Spain._

 

_transform! europe is a network of 38 European organisations from 22
countries, active in the field of political education and critical
scientific analysis, and is the recognised political foundation
corresponding to the Party of the European Left (EL). This cooperative
project of independent non-profit organisations, institutes,
foundations, and individuals intends to use its work in contributing
to peaceful relations among peoples and a transformation of the
present world._

* Spanish Civil War
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* Francisco Franco
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* Fascism
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* resistance
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* Argentina
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