The Shadow of the Caudillo: Spanish Memory Fifty Years After Franco

Fifty years ago, Francisco Franco died, ending more than three decades of far-right rule in Spain. Immediately after Franco’s death, the country adopted a Pact of Forgetting, an attempt to quell combative memory politics. In 2022, Spain changed course with the Democratic Memory Law, which sought to directly confront the Francoist regime and its victims. 

This panel will discuss the memory of the Franco regime and subsequent memory laws, reflecting on fifty years of post-Franco Spain. As well as to examine the challenges of navigating a post-fascist regime in the wake of extremism and authoritarianism. The discussion will encompass an introduction to the collective memory of Franco in Spain, the development of memory laws following the Franco era, and their influence on public memory. 

Stephanie R. Golob is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches courses on globalization, Latin American politics, and transitional justice.  She is also Faculty in the Ph.D./M.A. Program in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. At Baruch, Dr. Golob serves as the founding director of ISLA -The Initiative for the Study of Latin America, based at Baruch's Weissman School of Arts and Sciences. Her scholarship on the globalization of justice - with a focus on Chile and Spain - has been awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Resident Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Frank Cass Prize from the journal Democratization. For the past decade, Dr. Golob has participated as a member of an international research team, based at the Spanish National Research Council (CCHS-CSIC), studying the legal and political impact of post-atrocity mass grave exhumations in comparative perspective (http://politicasdelamemoria.org).  Her research on the role of domestic and international law in the politics of memory in Spain has appeared most recently in the volume Memory Laws and Historical Justice:  The Politics of Criminalizing the Past (Palgrave, 2022). 

Paco Ferrandiz received his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, and is currently Staff Researcher in the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology (ILLA) of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CCHS) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). presently Main Researcher of the research project The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain: A Decade of Mass Grave Exhumations, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CSO2009-09681) and more recently by the Ministry of Economy (CSO2012-32709 and CSO2015-66104-R).

This is the first in the "Resistance and Resilience" series, a four-part series highlighting resistance efforts against four far-right movements and the resiliency of the people involved.