Archive / Magazine / Current / Dictatorships in Retrospect / Article | 29/10/2008

The silence of the archives

In Spain political forces determine not only how the country addresses the Franco dictatorship but also how it deals with its archives.

Half of Spain stands under the long shadow cast by the civil war, which claimed hundreds of thousands human lives between 1936 and 1939. During this period General Franco's troops defeated the left-wing government in order to establish a dictatorship. Today silence reigns in the places where the military coup and the murders of political opponents have left their traces. To avoid endangering the political process that Spain has undergone since Franco's death in 1975 the country has tried to make a clean break with the past, and the dictatorship is referred to only as "the former regime”.

Boxes with civil war documents in the Catalan National Archive in Sant Cugat del Valles.

Photo: AP/Manu Fernandez

The reformist right, which drove this process, made it clear from the beginning that they did not intend to exploit the past for political purposes. The first thing they did, therefore, was to declare an amnesty for certain crimes committed after 1936. These included rebellion and uprising as well as offences committed "by functionaries and representatives of public order against the exercise of civil rights”. The principle according to which the first duty of democracy is to remember was thus invalidated so as not to endanger the political process. Or as the Andalusian writer Agustín Gómez Arcos, who lives in France, put it: "The dictatorship banned remembering, democracy prevents it.”

Orders to destroy the archives

The consequences of this policy had a major impact on how the archives were handled. Instead of protecting this documentary legacy a decision was taken to ignore it or even to destroy it. When in 1977 the fascist state party Falange was dissolved in the course of democratisation, the Interior Minister and ex-Falangist Rodolfo Martín Villa ordered the party archives to be destroyed. They contained documents on those who had served Spanish fascism for four decades. "They carried an unbearable stench of the past”, the civil governor of Barcelona declared after the archives disappeared. Other archives did not even have to be destroyed, because they decomposed as soon as they came into contact with the air. This was the fate suffered by numerous archives of local government.

In 1985 the "law on the historical legacy” was passed, thus creating a legal basis for this method of obstructing access to files. The law was phrased in deliberately ambiguous terms: on the one hand it was supposed to allow the archives to be examined, on the other it remained unclear whether in individual cases the basic right to information or the basic right to honour and privacy ["Derecho al Honor y a la Intimidad”] should take priority. The law also left open whether a document should be archived according to its own date or according to the date of the last document in the file. This situation caused headaches for many researchers and archivists during the 1980s and 1990s.

Structural reform

At the end of the 1990s the structure of the Spanish archives was reformed. Now all of them were apparently brought under one roof. That sounded good on paper but in practice the situation was rather different, and the core problem remained. This state of affairs led Daniel de Ocaña Lacal, the archivist at the Constitutional Court, to declare that if the way the authorities had set about regulating access to the archives became standard practice in other areas of the law, then Spain would once again become a primitive state. To find proof of this assertion one need look no further than the deplorable state of the military archives, which house key documents on the civil war and the dictatorship. Those responsible for these archives have not even created the most basic conditions for taking care of this documentary resource.

No coherent policy

In view of this situation we historians need to conduct a real "struggle for our history”, to use the words of the French historian Lucien Febvre ["Combats pour l'Histoire”, 1953]. We need to retrieve small portions of our documentary legacy piece by piece. Although the situation has improved, there are still grave structural problems. We lack a coherent policy to bring some degree of order and common sense into Spain's archives. For researchers everything seems to be proceeding very slowly and with no clear goal.

Francisco Espinosa Maestre

Der Historiker Francisco Espinosa Maestre wurde 1954 in Villafranca de los Barros (Badajoz) geboren und lebt in Sevilla. Espinosa Maestre koordiniert das Projekt "Alle Namen" ...
» to author index

Further articles on the subject » Domestic Policy, » History, » Spain
More from the press review on the subject » Domestic Policy, » History, » Spain