At the end of the First World War, many European countries, including Italy, experienced right-wing dictatorships. One of the most ferocious and long-lasting dictatorial regimes was that established in Spain by General Francisco Franco. Spain, which had remained neutral during the First World War, was in the 1920s a backward country, long on the margins of Europe's economic and social development. After centuries of monarchy, a republic was established in 1931.
The Spanish Republican government proposed a policy of renewal and reform, but it was held back by serious social and political tensions: on the one hand, the revolts of workers and miners, who demanded more radical reforms; on the other side, the protests and hostility of groups who felt damaged by the republic: landowners, the army, the Catholic clergy. The elections of July 1936 led to the victory of a popular front composed of socialists, republicans, radicals and communists.
At this point, however, the reactionary forces moved to armed action: in that same month, some army garrisons led by General Francisco Franco rose up against the government, starting a civil war that would cause almost a million deaths. The Spanish civil war was not only a manifestation of ideological, political and religious hatred, but also of class opposition: bourgeoisie against proletariat, wealthy classes against non-wealthy classes. The ferocity of the conflict was frightening: on both sides there were massacres of defenseless civilians, religious people, political vendettas, and collective executions. Between December 1938 and the spring of 1939, Franco carried out the “reclamation” of the territories that were being occupied, having all suspected republicans shot, and proceeded quickly to conquer Barcelona, Valencia and then Madrid. The area controlled by the Republicans shrank more and more, until Franco entered Madrid in March 1939. The civil war was over, but a fascist dictatorship began in Spain that would last until the mid-1970s.
Only after the death of Francisco Franco, in 1975, could the country return to democracy, but the democratic and anti-Franco forces, to avoid a possible new civil war, had to accept a painful pact: a clean slate for all the crimes of Francoism. Indeed, they had to accept a real removal of memory and truth. But can a people, a democracy, look forward with confidence without having healed wounds that are still open?
This is the question that inspires the book Quando il passato non vuole passato (Le Piccole Pagine, 2024, Euro 15.00, pp. 217) in which the well-known journalist Piero Badaloni reconstructs the crimes of Francoism and above all investigates how it was possible for several decades to preserve an embarrassing silence that covered in Spain the most brutal crimes of a dictatorship that has the record for longest duration in Europe. Just to give an example, during the Franco regime thousands of children were taken from their legitimate parents and given up for adoption. The children were "entrusted" to other families, in exchange for money or favors to repay for the support given to the generalissimo during the coup d'état. Midwives and doctors were paid to lie, often with the connivance and complicity of nuns and religious men who acted "in the name of God and the Fatherland". An event erased from the collective memory, from the memories of those who were neither the father nor the mother of those "confiscated" children. The tragedy of the niños robados is one of the darkest pages in twentieth-century European history, but it is a tragedy that has continued over time, as demonstrated by the difficulties encountered by those who, for years, have tried to give a name, an identity, to those who have suffered the theft of their past and their origins.
By telling us these sad events, Badaloni, with great civil passion, not only investigates one of the darkest pages in the history of Spain, but above all raises heavy questions about the historical memory of a nation and an entire continent that want to move forward without dealing with their past. Ignoring the past means, in fact, encouraging historical revisionism, offending the victims, destroying the sense of justice. It means building the future not on solid foundations, but on quicksand in which democratic systems can inevitably sink. This is true for Spain, it is true for the entire European continent and in particular for our Italy, always careful to postpone its accounts with the past.
