On 24 October 2019, the body of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain until his death in 1975, was moved from one grave, near Madrid, to another site not far away. This act was accompanied by both celebrations and protests. It was part of a recalibration of historical memory in Spain brought about by a specific law, passed in 2007. El Generalísimo, as Franco was known, had been buried within an extraordinary monument to himself called the Valley of the Fallen, built in part by forced labour and containing some forty thousand remains from the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) as well as an enormous cross 150 metres high. The re-burial of Franco’s corpse was designed to depoliticise the memories of the civil war in Spain, although the Valley of the Fallen remains in all its supposed glory.

The history of Spain in the 20th century is a history of extreme violence, disorder, instability (at least until 1939) and authoritarianism. A dictatorship right in the heart of Europe survived for thirty-six years, while people went on holiday to Spain’s beaches and admired its stunning architecture and art. I visited Spain as a child in 1972 and remember seeing marching soldiers on the streets of Madrid. My mother told me in hushed tones that those people ‘are fascists’. When Franco finally died, there was a transition to democracy which, with some hiccups (notably an attempted coup in 1981), has survived and flourished to this day. A so-called ‘pact of forgetting’ was agreed which implicitly called for the memories of the civil war and the violence of the regime to be suppressed in order for democracy to be given time to bed in and survive. In recent years this pact has collapsed thanks to historical research, the passage of time and the desire to literally dig into the past, which has resulted in the discovery of the mass graves of victims of massacres on both sides (but mainly of leftists and others killed by Franco’s troops). 

Two new books engage with both the history and the memory of Spain’s tumultuous and shocking 20th century. Nick Lloyd’s Travels Through the Spanish Civil War is the more original of the two. Lloyd, a resident of Barcelona for many years, works as a tour guide and has a deep