Excavating Europe’s last fascist monument: The Valley of the Fallen (Spain)

Abstract

Since 1945, most fascist monuments have disappeared or been deactivated in Western Europe. There is one in Spain, however, that remains fully operative: the Valley of the Fallen. The complex, devised by the dictator Francisco Franco, celebrates the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), keeps the bodies of thousands of victims of the conflict, as well as the leading fascist ideologue and the dictator himself, and provides a material narrative that exalts the dictatorship. With the advent of democracy in 1978, the Valley remained unchanged, untouchable, and an important focus for fascist and extreme right celebrations, both national and international. However, with the new progressive government that came to power in 2018, it has become the object of an ambitious program of resignification in which archaeology has an important role to play. In this article, I describe how archaeological work undertaken at the Valley of the Fallen is contributing toward destabilizing the dictatorial narrative by opposing the monumental assemblage of fascism to the subaltern assemblage of those who built it.

Lubyanka: Dissonant memories of violence in the heart of Moscow

“…In Spain, the post-Francisco Franco Amnesty Law of 1977 undergirded the “Pact of Forgetting” (“Pacto del Olvido”), which stymied prosecutions of people who committed human rights abuses during the Civil War and General Franco’s reign; however, in the past few decades, a “campaign to recover memory” (Davis, 2005), especially through exhumations of Civil War-era mass graves, has been spearheaded by activists and NGOs (Aguilar, 2008; Rubin, 2010). Dacia Viejo-Rose (2011) and Alfredo González-Ruibal and Carmen Ortiz (2015) have critically analyzed landscapes of remembering and forgetting Francoist violence in Spain, while the recent removal of Franco’s remains from the monumental Valley of the Fallen mortuary complex signals a marked change, though incomplete and heavily contested, in confronting the material heritage and necropolitics of the Franco regime (Brescó de Luna and Wagoner, 2022; González-Ruibal, 2022). These shifts in Spanish memory culture have not been accompanied by a project of official lustration or a truth and justice commission; in the words of Rachelle Wildeboer Schut and Zoltán Dujisin (2022), “the intense disagreement over the role of memory in Spanish society seems to both reflect and contribute to a larger crisis of regime legitimacy in Spain” (p. 19).…”