Telling Complicated Stories

“A lot of the political struggle between right and left is fought over how to tell the story of the national past,” says Professor of Hispanic Studies Sebastiaan Faber. In this respect, Spain isn’t much different from other countries that have been dealing with painful histories that linger in living memory: Germany and the Nazis, for instance, or the American South and Jim Crow.

Faber’s latest book, Exhuming Franco: Spain’s Second Transition (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021; second edition, 2023), was inspired by the 2019 decision by the Socialist-led Spanish government to move the generalissimo’s body from the Valley of the Fallen, a public memorial erected by Franco to the soldiers who died in the Spanish Civil War, to a private family plot. Proponents of the move argued that a democratic country should not continue to honor a fascist leader. Right-wing opponents claimed that moving Franco would be tantamount to erasing history. The fight went all the way to the Spanish Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the exhumation. 

For Faber, the debate echoed not just the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the removal of a monument to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, but also the rise of the American far right led by Donald Trump. The far-right Vox party, which began its rise in Spain in 2018, even borrowed one of Trump’s most popular slogans, vowing to make Spain great again.

“Generally, people in Spain who identify as conservative have a much more cavalier view of the legacy of Francoism,” Faber says. “They're not always convinced that it was bad for Spain to begin with.” The left, of course, feels otherwise.

These debates were not new to Faber, who frequently writes for American and Spanish media, so when his editor at Vanderbilt University Press suggested that he compile a book of interviews with academics, activists, and journalists about the current state of Spain after Franco’s exhumation, he jumped at the chance. “Using interviews as the basis for the book made it more readable,” Faber says, “and underscored the unresolved nature of these questions.” 

Faber spoke to 35 people for the book. What surprised him the most in the interviews was how strongly people on the left disagreed about how much Francoism has impacted present-day Spain. Some of the people he talked to see many of Spain’s current political problems — the corruption, the closed nature of the Spanish party system, the complicated relationship between Madrid and the 17 regional governments — as direct results of Francoism. Others believe those problems actually existed before Franco, as far back as the 19th century, and the dictatorship just exacerbated them. Still others believe the current state of corruption started after Franco, during the Transition period of the ’70s and ’80s from dictatorship to democracy.

“The real conundrum these days,” Faber says, “is how to explain the rise of the far right in Spain.” The Vox party isn’t Francoist, he argues, although it sometimes uses Francoist language and nostalgia for the dictatorship; notably, Vox, along with the Franco family, was one of the chief opponents of moving the generalissimo’s body. Instead, Faber says, it’s more like other far-right parties in Europe today, which aren’t totalitarian as much as geared toward protecting the interests of the rich.

Still, the rise of the right does remind people of Spain’s not-so-glorious past and makes them wonder about the best way to acknowledge and commemorate it. In that respect, Spain is a lot like France or Germany or Faber’s home country of the Netherlands. But because Spain’s history is so much different from the history of those countries — it didn’t participate in World War II, and Franco’s dictatorship lasted until 1975 — Spaniards tend to see the gap between themselves and other Western Europeans as larger than it actually is.

“I try to propose that Spain is not necessarily behind,” Faber says. “Spain has actually achieved much more than it thinks by grappling with these issues of what to do, how to think about the past, how to teach it, how to process it. The real challenge has been the fact that what story to tell about the past has become such a political weapon.” This new Transition, then, may be about what story Spain decides to tell.

Sebastiaan Faber’s research focuses on contemporary Spain and Latin America. He is the author of multiple books and is a frequent contributor to Spanish and U.S. media. Faber earned his doctorate in Spanish and Spanish American literature with a designated emphasis in critical theory at University of California, Davis.

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