Around the turn of the century, coinciding with the foundation in December 2000 of the “Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory,” people all over Spain came forward to point out the location of unmarked graves, where seventy years earlier a sizable number of men and women had been hastily buried. They were victims of purges undertaken by the rebel army and Falange death squads, often with the connivance and blessing of the religious authorities. These excavations were the high-water mark in the debate about the historical memory. In the absence of that debate, they may never have taken place. It is safe to surmise that, by stirring the public consciousness, the intellectual context created the opportunity. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to ask: why then? The answer to this question bears on the exhaustion of the transition ethos. A quarter of a century after the end of the dictatorship, faith in the breakthrough supposedly accomplished by the transition had dwindled, and the consequences of that loss of confidence were tangible in many spheres of life.

Leaving aside the frills, the transition was calculated to legitimize a state that had never been legitimate in the eyes of other states. Part of the legitimation strategy was to historicize the Civil War and the dictatorship. By “historicize” I do not mean to delve into the causes and contexts of the past, but to degrade memories into events that no longer claimed the attention, let alone aroused the passion, of anyone other than professional historians. Painful personal memories had to be replaced with events that people felt were remote and done with. And this had to be achieved without resorting to blatant censorship. Defusing the political implications of a collective memory that was still alert in the mid-1970s could be defended as a control strategy in a context of social volatility at the end of the Franco regime. This was a time of routine mass demonstrations and strikes in the largest cities, which the right met with overt provocations and violent episodes. There were also violent incidents on the left.