In the beginning was the cross.
Of eternal stone, of imperial aesthetics, of colossal size.
And attached to it, six words: “Fallen for God and for Spain”.
This is how the dictatorship carved out the myth that would forge the collective memory of the
homo Francoist
.
And nothing happened by chance.
Neither the symbol, nor the motto, nor the material, nor the aesthetics, nor the places where those death-scented crosses were placed.
Some crosses that weaved together the Francoist story with a material more durable than stone: the mystical feeling that the dead —on one side— were still “present!”
together with the survivors of the war to build a new Spain.
That world of yesterday with current echoes is reconstructed by the historian Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco in
Cruces de memoria y olvido
(Crítica), the first essay on the primary role played by the monuments to the fallen.
A descent to post-war black Spain.
To the country with empty cupboards, bursts on the wall and some widows in mourning and others shaven.
A symbolic journey that establishes an idea: memory says little about the past, a lot about the present and everything about the desired future.
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The phenomenon started early.
There was no ritual at the funeral of the young Emeterio Estefanía, the first to fall from the Francoist side on the night of the coup against the Republic.
However, in August 1936, everything changed.
First, those who gave "their life for Spain" were exalted.
Then he pointed to God.
And already in October 36, a obituary from
El Diario Palentino
about the funeral of Luis Ferrer de Yarza, a dead artillery lieutenant, praised the deceased as "Martyr of Religion and of the Homeland".
The myth of the fallen was born.
And it made the two souls of the rebels converge: the Catholicism of monarchists and Carlists with the nationalism of the Falange.
Una entente cordiale: Fallen for God and for Spain.
Fallen –also– to support a story that the Franco regime was going to direct and exploit to the point of exhaustion.
In February 1938, with the war still going on, the first Franco government set up a Style Commission for the Commemorations of the Homeland.
Its purpose was to subject something as individual as memory to “general and common norms”.
Its members were Eugenio d'Ors, a conservative Catholic;
José Antonio Sangróniz, a marquis of Spanish Renewal;
Leopoldo Eijo y Garay, bishop of Madrid-Alcalá, where the symbolic executions of Paracuellos took place;
the historian Vicente Castañeda Alcover, secretary of the Royal Academy of History;
and the architect Pedro Muguruza, head architect of the Franco regime and future builder of the cross of crosses: the Valley of the Fallen.
“None of the members can be clearly identified with Falangism, but rather with the Catholicism of Francoist nationalism of origin
menendez-pelayista
”, explains the author.
This fact had an immediate effect: the cross.
In August 1938, a communication from Dionisio Ridruejo, national head of Propaganda, warned the undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior that "only a general type, simple, consisting of a Cross" would be allowed in the monuments in memory of the fallen.
The cross was opposed to the anticlerical Spain of the Republic.
The cross promised the resurrection of the sacrificed.
The cross referred to the old conquering empire.
The upright cross, supplier of shadows and dreams for the nascent regime.
The permanent shadow of war.
The dream of a new Spain.
Dionisio Ridruejo in an image taken during the Civil War. Universal History Archive (UIG via Getty Images)
The crosses, emphasizes Professor Del Arco, "were not, as could happen in the case of Soviet communism, German Nazism or Italian fascism, monuments whose meaning promised a world and an idyllic situation."
They were, rather, the gloomy photo of a yesterday that should be projected into tomorrow: the excluding memory of the war.
The first historical memory on the Civil War.
Crossroads of memory and oblivion
excels in one aspect: the details.
The author, who directs the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Granada, has dusted off numerous archives to offer the small print of this great propaganda operation.
The examples reveal the iron rules that prevailed to achieve aesthetic unification.
The obelisk project in Sestao was knocked down.
"We believe that our fallen should not be commemorated except with the Cross," wrote Ridruejo himself in response to the obelisk.
Santurce's project to honor five martyrs, with the large figure of a soldier, was also rejected due to the "meanness" of the size of the cross.
Because the crosses had to enhance the monumentality, like the twenty-five meters high in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
And, of course, they had to be made of stone.
No modern materials.
As the intellectual Ernesto Giménez Caballero used to say, cement "smells of socializing, five-year plans, a Bolshevik novel, a Yankee movie, a free woman, organized misery, the dissolution of the family, numbered officials."
The classicism of the straight stone, on the other hand, went back to the Hispanic style, to the imperial grandeur, to the architecture of Juan de Herrera in El Escorial.
And so it was done.
Monument to the Fallen in the Plaza de España in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
GOVERNMENT OF THE CANARY ISLANDS (GOVERNMENT OF THE CANARY ISLANDS)
Crosses began to sprout all over the country.
How many is unknown.
Almost never in hidden cemeteries, but in large avenues and in the main square.
They acted as sentinels where social life took place, where neighbors gathered on holidays, where day laborers waited each morning to be hired.
There stood the cross, chiseling consciences from dawn to dusk.
Fallen for God and for Spain.
The mantra went deep.
And he did it, among other things, because nothing was left to chance.
Republican names were not allowed on gravestones adjacent to the cross.
Neither of women.
They were assigned a passive role in mourning as mothers, wives, and sisters.
The martyrs of Francoism, on the other hand, had to distill a "masculine and virile" image.
Nor was the slightest deviation allowed.
When the residents of Cirauqui, in Navarra, wanted to honor "those who fell for God and Spain", the Falangist informer ordered the change of "for God and for Spain" to balance the weight of the religious and the national.
When Terrassa proposed a monument with the legend "PAX", the project was rejected.
It was time to remember the war, not the peace.
Time passed.
For the dictatorship and for its crosses.
Oblivion gradually took over the monuments.
The stony memory that was dreamed of eternal cracked.
And the crosses became the target of attacks.
First, with graffiti, as in Zamora in 1967. Later, with explosives, as happened with the Diagonal cross in Barcelona in 1974, destroyed by a bomb.
The Transition opened a new time.
But the crosses were still standing.
Few dared to remove them.
Granada did it, in 1985, at seven in the morning on a Saturday in August, without prior notice.
With the 2007 Historical Memory Law, a rupture did occur.
Many crosses disappeared from public space.
Others still remain, with litigation included.
Today, from his historian's point of view, Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco agrees with the British historian Tony Judt on “the risks derived from giving ourselves over to an excessive cult of commemorating the traumatic past”.
And he warns against the “dissymmetry of memory” that sacralizes previously ignored victims and forgets the previously idealized dead.
Perhaps, the author argues, that is the lesson of the crosses of the Franco regime: that in a democratic society there is not a single memory, but rather different memories, in the plural.
Many, large, free.
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