Spain’s plans for a national civil war museum in chaos

Eighty-five years after the conflict that shaped modern Spain, the prospect of the first national museum devoted to the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship is receding amid polarised politics and a lack of agreement over how to commemorate the country’s history.

Right-wing regional governments want to reverse the socialist central government’s historical commemoration law. The law was passed in 2022 with the aim of bringing justice to the victims of the war and Franco’s rule. After an election victory in Aragon in August 2023, the conservatives of the Partido Popular (PP) and the far-right Vox party succeeded in pushing through their “law of concord” in February, overturning the legislation on historical commemoration in this region in eastern Spain.

While the Spanish Constitutional Court has provisionally suspended the Concord Law in Aragon following an objection by the socialist government of Pedro Sanchez, the PP and Vox have announced that they will appeal against the suspension.

The right’s victory raises doubts about the future direction of the planned National Museum of the Battle of Teruel and the Civil War, whose content is now to be defined under the new PP-Vox leadership. The museum is already under construction in Teruel, the setting of a key battle in the war that led to Franco’s victory and the regime that lasted until 1975.

“We have suffered a moral blow,” says Enrique Gómez, president of the Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory of Aragon. From Gómez’s point of view, the project had already gone in the wrong direction before the election. At the beginning of 2023, it was announced that a memorial in the museum’s garden would contain the names of those who died in battle, without distinguishing between those who fought for and against Franco.

In the course of the dispute over the memorial, those responsible for building the museum, historian Javier Paniagua and museologist Joan Santacana, wrote in an open letter in February 2023 that they were no longer in contact with the government and had no information about the development of the museum.

“We doubt that the future museum of Teruel will serve to confront a past that has shaped and continues to shape Spanish society,” wrote Paniagua and Santacana.

“Revisionist” laws

Three UN human rights experts warned in a May letter that “concord laws” like the one in Aragon could run counter to Spain’s commitment to preserving historical human rights violations because “they order the suppression of numerous organizations, projects, websites and activities related to historical memory,” according to media reports. They said the laws amount to “revisionism”; for example, the concord law in Aragon refers to “Francoism” rather than “dictatorship.”

The construction of the museum in Teruel is slowly progressing. The Cultural Directorate of Aragon confirmed The art newspaper that the functions and contents of the museum are currently being defined, but no details on the methodology or timetable could be given.

Meanwhile, Spain’s Minister for Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory announced earlier this year that his ministry would work with the Ministry of Culture to create a national “centre-museum” for democratic memory in Madrid. The government’s law on democratic memory requires the creation of such a centre to “protect the dignity of the victims of war and dictatorship through their participation”.

However, sources close to the Ministry of Territorial Policy question the solidity of these plans and point to a lack of coordination between the two ministries. The Ministry of Territorial Policy did not respond to requests for information. The Ministry of Culture simply said: “Such a museum has not been announced by the ministry.”

There are currently a few local museums in Spain dedicated to the Civil War, but they are often underfunded. In April, for example, the Museum of the Battle of Jarama near Madrid closed its doors after 25 years due to a dispute with neighbors and lack of funding.

In Canada, a project led by two historians aims to digitally close this gap. Adrian Shubert from York University in Toronto and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, have jointly founded the Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War. a visual and narrative archive of nearly 300 entries. Funded largely by Canadian institutions, it has received more than 100,000 visitors since its opening in September 2022.

“There is no global museum on the Spanish Civil War and it looks like there won’t be one,” says Cazorla-Sanchez. “So the aim is to bring the very complex history of the Civil War closer to the public and to tell many personal stories.”

Shubert says that while a national museum is not a prerequisite for the country to engage with its heritage, “it would say something about how serious a society, represented by its government, is about it.”

But as long as there is no consensus on how to deal with this heritage, it may be impossible for a museum to act independently of politics.