The greatest paradox in the popular debate about the historical memory could well be the concern with its frailty, the almost conspiratorial alarm at its suppression, and widespread demand for its protection by means of specific legislation, foundations, archives, monuments, museums, ceremonies, and other public initiatives intended to anchor the past in society's awareness. In the face of massive preoccupation with the dominant tendency to forget—a byproduct of society's evolution—and, in the case of Spain, with an alleged machination to accelerate this tendency with regard to the Civil War and the ensuing military regime, it is important to look at the facts. And the facts show that, on the intellectual plane in general and that of history in particular, there was no forgetting during the years following the Franco dictatorship. There was selection of the narratives, strategic emphasis on certain elements at the expense of others, depending on who told the story, whose viewpoint became the cornerstone for the edifice of the past in historical recollection, whose interest and for what goals dictated the syntax of the narrative, determined its agents, interpreted their motivations. To admit memory's subjective organization (how could memory, an affair of consciousness, not be subjective?) is not to declare it threatened or abolished. It is merely to place it where it belongs: in the relative space and temporality of reflective consciousness, from where positivist historians of the nineteenth century and their belated epigones, who claim to represent a “scientific” history based on the aseptic handling of the facts, had taken it. Claiming collegiate ownership of memory, and unaware of the historical origins of their own disciplinary language game, such historians mistake archival documents for facts.

Although it is often said that the victors write history, denouncing its distortion is not the exclusive task of the vanquished. Francoists were not the only ones who covered up their crimes and obscured their atrocities. Often, when someone calls on society to remember, it is not to center the scale but to legitimate a partial version of the past as if it were the complete account. Long after its official conclusion, the Civil War continued to be fought on the ideological front.