La historia difícil — The Difficult History

The twentieth century, and how to talk about it

This is the hardest subject in the course and the one a visitor is most likely to blunder into, so it is worth the space. What follows is the sequence of events and the shape of the argument about them; the argument itself is not this course's to settle. The facts in outline. A military coup in July 1936 against the elected government of the Second Republic failed to take the whole country, and the result was a civil war that ran until April 1939 and killed something like half a million people. Both sides committed large-scale killings of civilians behind their own lines; the scale, the intent and the comparability of the two are disputed by historians and the dispute is not merely political. The war was won by the rebel side under Francisco Franco, who ruled until his death in November 1975. The repression did not end in 1939: executions, imprisonment and forced labour continued into the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of thousands went into exile, and the last executions took place in September 1975, two months before Franco died. Tens of thousands of people remain in unmarked graves; Spain is often described as having more unidentified dead in mass graves than any country except Cambodia, and grave exhumations are still happening now. Then the part that explains the silence. The Transition to democracy between 1975 and 1978 was deliberately built on not prosecuting the past. The Amnesty Law of 1977 covered political crimes on both sides, including those of the state; the Constitution was agreed by consensus in 1978; and the informal understanding that came with it is remembered as el pacto del olvido, the pact of forgetting. Its defenders argue it was the price of a peaceful transition in a country with the army still intact and a coup attempt still to come in 1981. Its critics argue that it bought stability with the families of the dead as the currency. Both of those are serious positions held by serious people. The argument now runs through law. The 2007 Ley de Memoria Histórica formally condemned the dictatorship and funded exhumations; the 2022 Ley de Memoria Democrática went further, declaring the regime illegal, making the state responsible for locating the dead, and annulling the sentences of its courts. Franco's remains were moved out of the Valle de los Caídos in 2019. Each of these steps was passed by some parties and opposed by others, and each is described by its opponents as reopening what was closed and by its supporters as finally doing what was never done. Now the practical advice, which is the part you can actually use. Almost every Spanish family has a story in this, and the stories do not line up neatly by side — there are families with dead in both, and families who still do not agree among themselves. So: do not raise it in a first conversation, do not ask a stranger which side their family was on, and do not use Franco as a light comparison or a joke. If somebody raises it themselves, as the Abuela does here, you may ask — carefully, with the hedges in this lesson's fifth grammar point — and you should listen far more than you speak. Being told prefiero no hablar de eso ends the subject; there is no polite second attempt. And if you are told something, understand what you have been given: in a country where a great many people said nothing for forty years, being told is a form of trust rather than an item of information.