of the Civil War by the novelist José María Gironella.
Key events of the Civil War were reconstructed in a way that bore virtually no connection to the historical record. A case in point is the bombing of Guernica, arguably the most iconic battleground of the Civil War, by German planes in April 1937, at Franco’s request. According to official documents from the Basque government, the bombing reduced this historic Basque village to rubble and killed 1,654 people (about a third of the village’s population). Such devastation inspired Picasso’s iconic Guernica, a painting intended by the artist to depict the horrors of right-wing violence in his native Spain and credited with helping change world opinion about the Spanish Civil War in favor of the Republicans. Incredibly, the Franco regime turned this episode into evidence of the cruelty of the Basque people.18 According to the Franco regime’s official story, “the villagers torched their own city”; no German participation in the bombing is even acknowledged (Aguilar 2008: 163).
Public monuments glorifying the 1936 Nationalist uprising against the Republican government were designed to shape public perception about the Civil War and the dictatorship. The town of Belchite, in the province of Zaragoza, site of the Battle of Belchite (1937), was subjected to a bizarre form of memorializing by being preserved in its complete destruction as a “vivid testament of the catastrophe that occurred in Spain and of the supposed viciousness of the Republicans” (Aguilar 2008: 163).”19 Franco rebuilt the city in 1939, next to the ruins of the old one, as an example of his regime’s capacity to bring peace and order back to Spain. The ultimate (and most controversial) act of consecration of the memory of “the Spirit of 1936” and its protagonists, however, was the construction of El Valle de los Caídos, Franco’s monumental edifice to the “heroes” of the Civil War, roughly 30 miles from Madrid. The monument owes its notoriety, among other reasons, to its imposing architecture, widely derided as a prime example of fascist theatricality. As such, El Valle seems to have failed to live up to the expectations of its main architect, Diego Méndez, who envisioned homage to traditional Spanish neoclassical architecture, along the lines of the neighboring royal monastery El Escorial, distinguished by its austere design. El Valle houses the Basílica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, only slightly smaller than St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican (its original size was actually larger than St. Peter’s but it was later modified out of respect to the pope), topped by a 500-foot cross, the tallest in the world, visible from miles away.20
Franco intended El Valle—commenced in 1940, just months after the end of the Civil War—to be built in just one year to memorialize “the Christian struggle against the ardently anti-clerical Republic,” in keeping with the notion of Spain as “God’s chosen nation” (Hite 2008: 5). However, due to the economic hardship of the postwar years and the difficulties posed by the complexity of its design, the monument took nearly two decades to complete. Trying to lower construction costs during a time of great economic stress, Franco resorted to using Republican prisoners to help build the monument, thereby surrounding it with even greater controversy and infamy.21 The workers were forced to quarry a cavern 250 meters deep into the rocks of the Sierra de Guadarrama, which houses the monument’s main basilica.
By the time El Valle was inaugurated in 1959, its purpose had shifted dramatically by seeking to advance two seemingly contradictory goals: honoring Franco’s victory over the Republicans during the Civil War (the original intent) and serving as a new symbol of national reconciliation. The latter is hardly a match for the former. The more than half a million people who visit El Valle annually, the vast majority foreign tourists, cannot escape the overwhelming sentiment of witnessing a shrine to Francoism.22 Almost every feature of the monument seeks to link Franco’s triumph over the Republicans to Spain’s religious tradition of epic evangelizing crusades: from the reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century over the Arabs, to the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, to the “discovery” of the Americas. In this sense, El Valle serves as a powerful symbol of the symbiotic relationship between church and state that was consolidated under Franco.
El Valle’s awkward nod to national reconciliation is suggested in the few hundred Republicans buried at the monument alongside some 50,000 Francoist supporters. How the remains of the defeated Republicans ended up buried beside those of the Nationalists at El Valle remains the source of some dispute. Some reports propose that this was a last-minute development suggested by the Catholic Church to underscore the monument’s new mission of closing the wounds of the Civil War. According to this narrative, relatives of Republican casualties could have the remains of their loved ones buried at El Valle provided they had documentation proving their relatives were Catholics. Most likely, however, the Franco regime exhumed some of the unmarked Republican graves found throughout the country and reburied the remains at El Valle without anyone’s consent, or simply buried Republican workers who helped build the monument. In any case, the existence of Republican remains at El Valle did not deter Franco himself from offending their memory in a speech to mark the dedication of the monument:
The anti-Spanish forces have been defeated and destroyed but they have not died. Periodically, we see how they raise their heads, and, in their arrogant blindness, seek to poison and stimulate once again the innate curiosity and ambition of the young. For that reason it is necessary to silence the advice of the bad teachers over the new generations.23
After 1959, promoting national reconciliation was dictated by the political realities of the day. For starters, two decades into the Francoist era, the myth of salvation from war and destruction—the founding myth of the Franco regime—was wearing thin, if only because memories of the Civil War among ordinary Spaniards were becoming increasingly distant. After 1959, the regime was also quite keen on improving its image abroad, having found itself internationally isolated after the end of World War II and the defeat of fascism in Germany and Italy. The effort at promoting national reconciliation culminated in 1964 with the extravagant “Campaign of 25 Years of Peace,” a series of commemorative events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Civil War. This grand commemoration included films, publications, and even a “peace parade” (highlighted, ironically enough, by a strong military presence) and was intended by the Franco regime to relegitimize its authority by highlighting its accomplishments rather than its origins (Aguilar 2002: 118–19).
Franco’s vast propaganda machine, organized around a national news and documentary service, Noticiarios y Documentales Cinematográficos (NODO), played a prominent role in promoting the authoritarian regime’s new emphasis on national reconciliation. Created in 1943 to facilitate dissemination of state cultural and information policy and to distill both domestic and international news for the public, NODO served the state with the dual purpose of consolidating control over information and using information as a propaganda tool. Its main products were newsreels, shown in the nation’s cinema houses alongside feature films, the primary form of popular entertainment prior to the advent of television in the late 1960s.24
As a propaganda tool, NODO’s primary mission was to promote the Franco regime and its accomplishments. The typical NODO newsreel highlighted the progress of the dictatorship, as suggested by the building of a new public work, such as a dam or a highway, as well as the purported benevolence of the dictator, as seen through the expansion of housing and recreational opportunities for the workers. Franco himself was a frequent subject of NODO documentaries. From 1943 to 1959, NODO’s coverage of Franco emphasized crediting the dictator with keeping the nation from falling back into civil war; after 1959, coverage aimed to tie the dictator to the advent of “peace and progress.” According to Ellwood (1995: 202), between 1943 and 1975, Franco appeared in over nine hundred NODO reports, which was equivalent to 4 percent of NODO’s total production. Franco’s appearances dwindled over the years from a record forty-five in 1965 to a mere nine in 1974, and two in 1975. This decline largely reflects NODO’s skilled manipulation of the image of the dictator. Franco was most likely to appear on the screen during periods of economic growth and relative stability, and to fade away during times of economic crisis and domestic turbulence. Conspicuously absent were references to the economic misery of the immediate postwar years and the repression
