Spaniards have now lived in democracy as long as they did under Franco's dictatorship. Forty years have elapsed since the first post-Franco elections. That amounts to two and a half generations by traditional assessments of the time of public influence of an age group. And the fact is that recent generations of Spaniards know about the Civil War roughly as much as their parents knew about the Republic: very little, if anything. And the little they know, they know it filtered through a precarious, uncertain memory. Memory deficiency, in this collective sense, means above all insufficient information, but the problem cannot be ascribed merely to a low flow of information but rather to lack of criteria in sifting and putting the pieces together. The filters were already in place and the censorship was much stronger when the transition was taking place. For the most part, those who tried to explain the transition against the grain of official discourses interpreted the events with the help of theories that were standard in left-wing political analyses at the time. Theories that seduced more than they explained; legitimated more than they clarified.

The transition, like the Civil War or Francoism, was not the solution of the previous conflicts but the synthesis of the historical dialectic, which became the new thesis, to put it in the Hegelian terms then in fashion. Expressed without the sepia color: contemporary analyses of the transition could not really be historicizing exercises, since they were steeped in the conflict they claimed to explicate. One of the best books on the subject, Jaume Lorés's La Transició a Catalunya (1985), suffered from the overvaluation of Marxism common at that time, while severely underestimating the importance of national identity that was to become hegemonic in Catalan politics over the following decades. Only four years after the publication of this book, Marxism was thrown on history's heap of discarded ideas.