The removal of the General [Queipo de Llano]'s remains from the Basilica in Seville in the early morning of November 3 was one of the first measures prompted by Spain's new Law of Democratic Memory, which the country's Senate approved on October 5, 2022, and which went into effect on October 20. The left-of-center coalition government of prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, hailed the law as an important next step in the country's coming to terms with the legacies of the Civil War (1936-39) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-75). But not everyone agreed. The Law of Democratic Memory was adopted two years after the event that sparked the first edition of this book: the exhumation of the dictator's remains from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen. Much like Franco's exhumation, the debate around the memory law served to reveal not only the fault lines that divide the political Left from the Right, but also the considerable gap between the demands of the grassroots memory movement--whose insistent pressure helped prompt both the exhumation and the law--and the government's response to those demands. The stated objective of the new legislation, which occupies 55 single-spaced pages in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, is to build on, update, and improve the memory law adopted 15 years earlier, in 2007, under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, then leader of the Socialist Party. Indeed, comparing the two laws is as good a way as any to measure what's changed in the way Spain, or at least part of Spain, thinks about its violent twentieth-century past.
Exhuming Franco : Spain's Second Transition, Second Edition