In 1975, on a satirical newscast on the American television show Saturday Night Live, mock reporter Chevy Chase announced Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s death for the better part of a year, reminding audiences that the dictator was ‘still dead’. As I describe in my book, to announce Franco’s death, Chase ‘read a quote from the soon-to-be-disgraced US President Richard Nixon proclaiming “General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness”’. In juxtaposition to those words, a photo of Franco marching alongside Adolf Hitler flashed behind Chase to stilted laughter. On Thursday, 24 October, Francisco Franco’s body was exhumed—and not simply to find out if the dictator is still dead.
Next year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Franco, the Nationalist-Catholic fascist dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 until 1975. In preparation for that anniversary, Franco’s body was disinterred from its current location at the so-called ‘Valley of the Fallen’ and moved to the El Pardo-Mingorrubio cemetery—where his wife, Carmen Polo, is buried. The Valley and Franco’s body are at the centre of a decades-long polemic that has both fascist groups and conservatives decrying the current Spanish government’s fight to both contextualize and change the meaning of Franco’s gravesite. Thousands travelled to the dictator’s tomb as government officials prepared to exhume his body, and hundreds showed up to the services on Thursday, including Antonio Tejero, the former lieutenant-colonel who led a failed coup d’état against the young Spanish democracy in 1981.
The Valley of the Fallen, a soaring 150-metre-high (500 ft) monument and basilica located just outside Madrid, was inaugurated on 1 April 1959—constructed over almost two decades by enslaved political prisoners. Built on the mass graves of tens of thousands of unidentified victims of the Spanish Civil War, the Valley was meant to honor those who died fighting for the nationalists during the war. When Franco died, his body was interred there near José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spain’s fascist party, the Falange. The official website of the Valley even calls visitors there ‘pilgrims’—a title typically reserved for those who embark to visit religious holy sites instead of a monument celebrating the destruction of a democratic republic by fascists.
