In the middle of September, three weeks before Spain’s senate approved a landmark law to honour the victims of the Spanish civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, a new museum quietly threw open its digital doors.
The Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War, an online history centre that has been almost a decade in the making, may chronicle and examine a conflict that ended 83 years ago but its aims could not be more timely.
As last Wednesday’s senate session demonstrated, there is still precious little consensus over the 1936-39 war and how to deal with its bitter legacy.
Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the new law would strengthen the country’s democracy and help bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the war and the Franco regime.
His opponents begged to differ. A senator for the conservative People’s party accused the government of trying to “rewrite history” and of “dynamiting” 40 years of forgiveness and reconciliation. The far-right Vox, meanwhile, said it was a “despicable and wretched attack” on Spain’s recent history.
Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, one of the architects of the virtual museum, says that while there is a wealth of excellent historical research and material on the war, much of it has not been properly transmitted to the general public. Old enmities, decades of silence, and cursory approaches to teaching schoolchildren about the war and its aftermath mean partisan attitudes, binary analyses and political distortions continue to this day.
“When we started this project, we had to figure out many things, such as what the situation was of the public history of the Spanish civil war in Spain,” says Cazorla-Sánchez, a professor of history at Trent university in Canada.
“We came up with the idea that in Spain we have islands of memory in public history. We wanted to connect them and to create a continent of knowledge. We wanted to create tools that would enable us to convey the history of Spain and the memory of Spanish history to wide sectors of the population.”
The online centre, which bills itself as the “first museum dedicated to this central event of 20th-century history”, tackles topics that were long taboo under Franco and which remain problematic for many today.
Three years after Franco’s remains were finally removed from their mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, Spain now has a democratic memory law that will see the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves, and a ban on groups that glorify the Franco regime.
Although the socialists and their far-left coalition partners see the law as a necessary attempt to come to terms with the past, the Spanish right views it as an affront to the 1977 amnesty law and the so-called Pact of Forgetting that helped steer the country back to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975.
Faced with such polarisation, says Cazorla-Sánchez, there is an acute need for “an inclusive, democratic discourse” about what really happened in the war, about the atrocities committed by both sides, and about what happened afterwards.
“The Francoists kidnapped the pain of the Spaniards,” he says. “They kidnapped history for their own purposes and they built a discourse that was Manichaean, criminal and hypocritical. We have to get those victims incorporated into our current identity from a humanistic and democratic perspective.”
Cazorla-Sánchez and Adrian Shubert, the project’s co-creator, are also uncomfortable with the way that memory is now often used as a synonym for history.
“They are very different things and to really appreciate and understand historical memory, one has to have a reasonably good understanding of the history of what actually happened and how what happened has been presented publicly, and privately, over time and the way those things have changed,” says Shubert, a history professor at Canada’s York university.
The concept of memory, adds Cazorla-Sánchez, can often be a stumbling block to necessary debates: “The moment you put the word ‘memory’ in a text, half the Spanish population goes the other way because it’s all about ‘the Reds’ and ‘revenge’. I think we have to open new mental horizons when it comes to how we approach difficult history.”
The team behind the museum is meeting later this month to discuss the next phase of the project. Plans include teaching tools for schools and universities, a linking of existing databases and resources, and a callout to people in Spain to create an “open gallery” of objects and documents relating to the war.
“One of the ways of dispelling these clouds of politics around the civil war is hearing ordinary Spaniards – not academics, not politicians – just talking about what it means to them,” says Shubert.
He also points out that the Spanish civil war was never a purely Spanish event and that its pains and lessons continue to resonate – especially at a time when the far right is resurgent in Europe and beyond.
“Its origins and causes lay in Spanish domestic history, but, from the outset – and some people would argue even before the outset – it was an international conflict,” says Shubert. “And it was a complex international conflict that can’t be boiled down simply to democracy versus fascism – but certainly that was one of the elements in it. It mobilised people around the world in a way that no event had before, and perhaps never has since.”
Cazorla-Sánchez, unsurprisingly, agrees. “The Spanish civil war matters because we should be aware that democracy is fragile,” he says. “And it’s always at the back of the minds of all democrats: we know our freedom can be taken away sooner than we think.”
