El Valle de los Caídos

El Valle de los Caídos
a study in remembrance and revenge

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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THE VALLEY OF THE FALLEN (Valle de los Caídos), the Francoist monument and mausoleum in central Spain, completed in 1959, is used in this paper as a case study for analytical techniques associated with memory studies, cultural history, and reception theory. A monument, as Alon Confino has observed, ‘cannot speak for itself; to decipher its meaning, we must examine intermediaries between the social world and its artistic representation … In reality, the crucial issue is not what is represented but how this representation has been interpreted and perceived’.[1] Thus, the present study proceeds from the assumption that a monument’s meanings and significances exist only in the perceptions and representations of the artefact concerned, and that scholars must pay as much attention to the processes of reception as to those of conception and construction. In the case of the Valley of the Fallen, the partisan nature of the monument and the polarized political and social climate in which it came into existence and continued to exist give questions of perception and reception particular significance. No analysis of the Valley of the Fallen can succeed which does not recognize the overwhelming importance of the perception of its creator that ‘by right of conquest, one half of the nation could rule over the other’[2] in influencing its scale, its form, its language of power and domination, and the ways in which it was perceived and received by those who experienced it. The iconography of the Valley of the Fallen, the personal commitment of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, to the project, the unambiguous one-sidedness of the memorial, its vast scale and monumental ambition, place issues of contested perceptions and representations at the heart of approaches to this artefact.

The Spanish Civil War ended, after three years of often brutal fighting, with the total victory of the Nationalists in March 1939. The decree announcing the foundation of the monument was dated 1 April 1940, one year precisely after the famous telegram in which Franco had signalled the end of the Civil War with the declaration ‘the war is over’. The first of April, which became known as the ‘Day of Victory’, was also the date upon which the completed Valley of the Fallen was eventually inaugurated, in 1959. Franco himself chose the site for the monument, after a lengthy search: the dramatic valley of Cuelgamuros in the granite foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, thirty-five miles north-west of Madrid. The wording of the decree founding the Valley of the Fallen makes explicit the scale of the undertaking, and its profoundly partisan nature as a monument, not of reconciliation, but of victory:

The dimension of our Crusade, the heroic sacrifices involved in the victory and the far-reaching significance which this epic has had for the future of Spain cannot be commemorated by the simple monuments by which the outstanding events of our history and the glorious deeds of Spain’s sons are normally remembered in towns and villages. The stones to be erected must have the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness …[3]

Franco’s intention was clear: to build on the scale of the monuments of the ancient world a memorial to the ‘crusade’ through which he had saved Spain: ‘It was indicative of his self-regard that, like the Pharaohs, he could think in terms of a monument on a scale that would defy posterity’.[4]

Construction of the monument took two decades. The architects were Pedro Muguruza and Diego Méndez, although Franco constantly intervened and strongly influenced the design of the project. The work of construction itself was undertaken by the forced labour of 20,000 Republican prisoners, fourteen of whom were killed and many more injured; it was intended that through such work prisoners would have the opportunity to ‘redeem themselves’.[5] Once again the partisan nature of the memorial was expressed with ruthless clarity. The fundamentally religious nature of the monument was expressed through the associated Benedictine community; it is notable that, whatever Franco’s view about the close association between his regime and the Catholic Church, he had great difficulty finding a monastic leader willing to act as the head of the community at the Valley of the Fallen. His eventual choice, Fray Justo de Urbel, was well-known as an almost fanatical supporter of Franco, and his stock within the Church and in the wider community was correspondingly low.[6]

As well as offering a setting of great natural grandeur, the site chosen for the Valley of the Fallen had the advantage of proximity to another great historic monument, the Escorial of Philip II. The Escorial is simultaneously palace, monastery, monument and mausoleum, and the Valley of the Fallen follows the same pattern in partaking of several characters simultaneously. It serves as a memorial to those who fell in the Civil War; it was supposedly to commemorate the fallen of both sides, but there is no question that it is in conception and execution a partisan memorial devoted to celebrating the Nationalist Victory and the Nationalist fallen. Franco’s reference to ‘our Crusade’ and the symbolism and iconography of the monument, discussed in detail below, make clear the identification of the Valley of the Fallen with one side, the side of the victors. Inextricably linked to its role as a memorial is its character as a monument to military victory – once again an intrinsically partisan purpose. The monument is also profoundly religious in character, a celebration of the Catholic faith and the particular variant of Christianity that the Francoists identified with their cause. Finally, and by no means least importantly, this is a mausoleum and funerary monument. The crypt of the basilica was to be the resting place of 150,000 war dead, the overwhelming majority of whom come from the Nationalist side.[7] More symbolically important, however, is the monument’s role as personal mausoleum for Franco. Even before Franco’s own tomb was prepared, the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, executed by the Republicans in 1936 and elevated by the Nationalists to the status of a martyr, was reburied at the Valley of the Fallen after being initially interred at the Escorial. Franco himself was buried there in 1975, behind the high altar.[8] The use of the Valley of the Fallen as a personal mausoleum for Franco can be seen as the apotheosis of the monument and the final expression of General Franco’s very personal interest in the project: throughout its history the Valley of the Fallen was ‘a monument as dear to Franco’s heart as the Escorial was to Philip II’s’.[9]

The Valley of the Fallen: map showing the constituent elements of the monument. [Image copyright: greycat.org]

The Valley of the Fallen is epic in scale and monumental in construction. It consists of four elements: a great open plaza embraced by massive colonnades, a vast underground basilica, a lofty cross crowning the hill above the basilica, and a Benedictine monastery whose church is the basilica. The cross is raised on a double plinth, with sculptures by Juan de Ávalos of the Four Evangelists on lower plinth (80 feet in height) and of the Four Cardinal Virtues on the upper plinth (130 feet in height). Below the cross is the basilica, the nave of which is 850 feet long and 200 feet high; the plaza is larger in area than St Peter’s Square in the Vatican; and the cross is 500 feet high and can be seen from thirty miles away. The focal point of the composition, with the valley below and the Guadarrama mountains behind, is the entrance to the basilica, which is located on the centerline of the site and is flanked by the two curving colonnades with their huge arches. Above the entrance to the basilica is a sculpted pietà.

View of the monument from the east, showing the colonnade with the entrance to the basilica in the centre, and the cross rising above. Photograph by Håkan Svensson. [Public domain image: source]

The nave of the basilica itself is over 800 feet long, a vast barrel-vaulted space. On the north side of the nave are three chapels to the Virgin Mary: first the ‘Virgen de Africa’ representing Spanish North Africa, where the military rebellion against the Republic began in 1936; second the ‘Virgen del Pilar’ representing the province of Aragon, where the last campaign of the war was fought in 1939; and third the ‘Virgen de la Merced’ who is patroness of Christian captives, and whose cult began in the thirteenth century during the reconquest of Spain from its Muslim rulers. Thus the chapels represent the victorious progress of Franco’s armies across Spain between 1936-9 and directly associate his cause with that of Christian Spain of the Reconquista and those who fell in that cause with the medieval Christian soldiers captured by the Moors. Opposite the three chapels to the Virgin are three more chapels, also dedicated to different aspects of Mary, one each for the armed services of land, sea and air, further strengthening the militarized character of the basilica. The climax of the basilica is the altar, behind which – in the holiest place of all – are the tombs of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, and Francisco Franco himself.

The component parts of the monument are held together by the links of religion and the ideals of Christian Spanish nationhood, purified through the ‘crusade’ of the Civil War. The monument of the Valley of the Fallen can thus be seen to combine homage to the three pillars of the Francoist state, the Army, the Church, and the Falange. The context to the construction of the monument is provided by the cultural atmosphere of the 1940s, a period described as ‘the making of the Francoist state’.[10] The Valley of the Fallen was part of the officially-sponsored cult of those who died in the Civil War ‘por Dios y por España’ (‘for God and Spain’). The official line on the valley was that it was a monument to the fallen of both sides, but the ‘cult of the dead’ of which it was part was solely directed to honouring the side of the victors:

there was no attempt on the part of the State to take pity on the vanquished or to seek to reunited them with the victors. Rather ‘the cult of the dead’ was fostered. For the next twenty years every night at 10 o’clock all radio stations would broadcast a salute ‘to the fallen for God and Spain’.[11]

The Valley of the Fallen can thus be considered as a consciously created and ideologically charged ‘site of memory’. The concept of the ‘site of memory’ is perhaps most fully conceptualized in the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Pierre Nora. Between 1984 and 1992 Nora edited and contributed to a large-scale study of the ‘sites of memory’ of France, which he defined as sites where cultural memory ‘crystallizes and secretes itself’.[12] Such sites included places such as archives, museums, cemeteries and historic buildings, practices such as rituals, objects such as inherited property, commemorative monuments, emblems and symbols.[13] Cornelius Holtorf observes that for Nora such sites of memory are ‘artificial, and deliberately fabricated’,[14] and that the constructed history embodied and transmitted through such phenomena is distinct from a ‘real’ and ‘true’ living memory that no longer exists. Holtorf accepts the basic contours of Nora’s analysis but takes issue with his clear distinction between ‘real’ and ‘constructed’ memory, a distinction that leads Nora to exclude prehistoric and ancient monuments from his category of ‘sites of memory’;[15] for Holtorf all cultural memory is ‘constructed’ memory, with prehistoric monuments embodying a ‘will to remember’ and monuments that were already old in the ancient world becoming ‘significant in different cultural memories, thus constituting true sites of memory’. For the purposes of the present analysis, it is clear that the Valley of the Fallen undoubtedly constitutes a ‘site of memory’ at which ‘memory crystallizes’ and takes a concrete form, and through which cultural memory is constructed. The Valley of the Fallen is a twentieth-century monument, and thus fits into Pierre Nora’s categorization of sites of memory as essentially a modern phenomenon, but at the same time the process of the reshaping and manipulation of memory that goes on there is continuous and an intrinsic part of human culture. It can thus be said to act in the same way as the prehistoric monuments studied by Holtorf:

Monuments represent a variety of constantly changing meanings, determined by the light in which they are seen. People receive these monuments in the landscape by constructing an ‘imaginary world’ around them, just like readers of a text construct an ‘imaginary universe’ during the process of reading. These imaginary worlds are determined by the implicit aesthetic characteristics of the given texts as much as by the contexts of the actual receptions.[16]

The significance of the Valley of the Fallen thus flows from the form of the monument itself but also reflects the changing social, political, cultural contexts of its reception; the two processes are interdependent. Physically, the Valley of the Fallen remains the same, but the meanings read into those physical realities alter according to those perceiving them and the world they have constructed around themselves.

View of the cross from the monastery on the western side

Left: the entrance to the underground basilica from the plaza on the eastern side of the monument. The sculpted pietà is visible above the entrance. Right: view of the cross from the monastery on the western side. Photographs by Håkan Svensson. [Public domain images: source]

The full significance and meanings of the Valley of the Fallen can thus only be ‘deciphered’ by an approach that gives due weight to this pattern of changing, ideologically- and culturally-loaded, perceptions and receptions. It is this approach that Alon Confino urges in his essay ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’. Confino outlines the role of ‘vehicles of memory’ – books, films, museums, commemorations – in defining and transmitting what is remembered. He also stresses the importance of relating ‘memory’ and the processes that define and sustain it to social and cultural contexts, not sacrificing the potential richness of memory as a historical category to a narrow analysis of politics and political use, ignoring the social context that defines ‘the mental horizon of an age’.[17]

Such questions gain an added pertinence when the artefact under consideration is so blatantly political, so clearly directed towards reshaping and defining memory, and so much part of a period of the Spanish past that involves a highly contested landscape of remembering and forgetting, as the Valley of the Fallen. Gertrude Himmelfarb has commented that those historians who argue for the ‘indeterminacy’ of the past are applying their own distorting standards to the past: ‘It is only by making the past indeterminate, making it a tabula rasa, that historians can impose upon the past their own determinacy’.[18] The case of the Valley of the Fallen serves as a reminder that, however far historians must reflect those contestable and debatable meanings in their interpretations they cannot act in complete disregard of the significances the objects of their study held for contemporaries. Those significances themselves change over time; the place of the Valley in contemporary imagination in the 1950s was not the same as it was in the 1990s, yet elements of continuity and stability are clearly as important as the less determinate elements of flux and instability. The monument remained, as it was intended to be, an intermediary between Francoism the ‘present’, whenever that present happened to be.

This is not in conflict with the emphasis of reception theory ‘on the reader rather than the author’ but it does need to be applied as a corrective to the view that ‘all actual receptions in the past and present are valid as such’.[19] By that criterion the claim of some pro-Franco interpreters that the Valley of the Fallen is a genuinely national monument representing the defeated as much as the victorious and the view that it is a triumphalist monument dedicated to celebrating the victors would need to be treated as equally valid, when the evidence of the monument itself clearly supports the latter interpretation rather than the former. That is not to say that both are not equally worthy of study; indeed, one of the purposes of such study must surely be to discriminate between the validity of different interpretations.

From the beginning, the Valley of the Fallen was an expression in granite of the ‘sectarian’, ‘narrowly partisan’ Spain which Franco and the Nationalists created and celebrated, a Spain that ‘vengefully tried to maintain the Civil War divisions of victors and vanquished’.[20] The types of ‘imagined readers’ implicit in the monument and the actual readers who responded to it did not exist in abstract but were conditioned, and are still conditioned to the present day, by the unavoidable character of this overall context. A historian of Spain commented on this not long after the monument was inaugurated:

Franco had decided to build his own Temple of the Dead where Jose Antonio [Primo de Rivera] would rest finally. It would be hewn out of the granite of the Guadarramas in a valley to be known as that of the Fallen, In its construction scores of those unfortunate political prisoners would die … Franco was constrained to make the Basilica a monument of Reconciliation, and it houses the remains of dead from both sides. In the minds of the conquered, however, it has remained one to the victors only, and many of the surviving victors concur.[21]

This acknowledgement of partisanship, of the hollowness of the Valley’s claim to be a symbol of reconciliation, can be seen clearly, for example, in the novel El Valle de los Caídos (1978) by the Spanish writer Carlos Rojas. Rojas’s novel uses the monument as the symbol of rational man’s failure to use his reason and escape the tyranny of destruction and war. For Rojas the valley transformed by Franco’s architects into a celebration of military victory and ideological triumph is the gateway to the nightmares of the artist Goya, the nightmares of civil war, unreason, and the mindless cycle of destruction and war. This novel can be seen as a case study of reception theory in action, dealing as it does with the interface between history and art. It is surely significant that for Rojas the expression of the true character of the Valley of the Fallen is found in hallucination, horror, and nightmare.[22]

With any work of art, the ‘imaginary readers’ whose reactions are one source of the evidence for reception theory do not exist as abstract entities but are the products of the social, political and cultural context which produce that work of art and continue to influence the reactions it produces subsequent to its production. When a work of art is as politically charged, and as partisan, as the Valley of the Fallen, it is particularly the case that the ideological determinants of the form it takes must be taken into account by any study of the way in which it has been received and perceived. If reception theory teaches anything, it is that no work of art, no production of human sensibility, exists apart from its social and political contexts.

The monument of the Valley of the Fallen is fundamentally an expression of a certain ideology, and cannot be separated from that ideological context. That ideology expresses the ideas and theories that, while they cannot be reduced to the economic classes of classical Marxist theory, are determined in the Spanish context by the relations of domination between victors and vanquished. This was certainly the perspective which informed the decisions taken by those who presided above the creation of the Valley of the Fallen; above all Franco himself. Any critical approach to the monument must, therefore, pay proper attention to the relationship between ideology and power that is implicit, and often explicit, in the forms and languages (aesthetic, symbolic, ideological) deployed in its creation. The Valley of the Fallen takes the situation of Nationalist victory and legitimates it in terms of Spanish history and the language of political and religious authority. The language thus articulated in the basilica, the chapels, the great cross, the colonnades, the architecture of classical domination and stability, the legitimizing strategies of religion and Spain’s crusading and Christian past, sustains and empowers behaviors (in the audience of the monument) of obedience and the acceptance of the victors’ dominion and the victors’ interpretation of history.

The Francoist regime was based on three fundamental pillars: the Army, the Church and the Falange (absorbed into the Francoist ‘National Movement’). These three elements are clearly embodied in the Valley of the Fallen: the tomb of Franco represents the presence of the great Christian military leader, the crusader for the freedom of his country; the tomb of Primo de Rivera reinforces the ideological legitimacy of the Francoist state (and stresses the importance of those who gave their loyalty to the Falange transferring that loyalty, totally and without question, to Franco); and the Church brings them both under its mantle, justifying them and all that has been done in their name in terms of Spain’s history and Spain’s imagined future. The Valley of the Fallen stands, not only as a monument to the dead of the Civil War but as a testament to the totalitarian ambition of the Francoist state. Franco’s regime sought to establish a new social, cultural and economic order, based on a disciplined, hierarchic, independent, harmonious society; an ambition represented above all in the institutions of Army, Falange, and Church. This was not merely a political program but required the reconstruction of the structures of culture and society, of the very spaces of social interaction and, crucially, interaction between the past and the present.

The Valley of the Fallen represents this program in its fullest dimensions. Not only did this great monument provide Francoism with its ritual spaces and focuses of devotion, it also located the Francoist achievement in historical context, relating it to the reconquest, the crusading liberation of Spain from alien influences and threats under a great crusading Christian leader. This highly personalized context is essential to an understanding of the Valley of the Fallen and the way in which it has been perceived and received. This monument was a highly personal project for the victor of the Civil War and dictator of Spain, General Franco. In its scale and its monumentality, the power and dominion implicit in its architecture and its language of triumphalism, the Valley is a highly potent embodiment of a particular ideological position.

© Ralph Harrington 2005. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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Notes

1. Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5 (1997), pp. 1391-2.

2. Paul Preston, Franco (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 786.

3. Preston, Franco, p. 351.

4. Preston, Franco, p. 351.

5. Preston, Franco, p. 351; George Hills, Franco: the Man and his Nation (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 331-2

6. Hills, Franco, p. 332.

7. ‘Forum on Spain: the Valle de los Caidos’, at http://wais.stanford.edu/Spain/spain_1thevalledeloscaidos73103.html (visited 4 May 2005).

8. Hills, Franco, pp. 331-2.

9. Arthur P. Whitaker, Spain and the Defense of the West: Ally and Liability (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 155.

10. Helen Graham, ‘Popular Culture in the "Years of Hunger"’, in Helen Graham & Jo N. Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 237.

11. Hills, Franco, p. 331.

12. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire’, Representations, no. 26 (1989), p. 7.

13. Cornelius Holtorf, Monumental Past (1998), at https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/index.html (visited 18 June 2005).

14. Holtorf, Monumental Past.

15. Holtorf, Monumental Past.

16. Holtorf, Monumental Past.

17. Confino, ‘Collective Memory’, pp. 1393, 1403.

18. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Some Reflections on the New History’, The American Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 3 (1989), p. 668.

19. Holtorf, Monumental Past.

20. Preston, Franco, pp. 782-3.

21. Hills, Franco, pp. 359-60.

22. Diana Glad, ‘The Demons of Carlos Rojas’, World Literature Today, vol. 71, no. 1 (1997), pp. 77-8.

Bibliography

Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5 (1997)

‘Forum on Spain: the Valle de los Caidos’: http://wais.stanford.edu/Spain/spain_1thevalledeloscaidos73103.html

Diana Glad, ‘The Demons of Carlos Rojas’, World Literature Today, vol. 71, no. 1 (1997)

Helen Graham & Jo N. Labanvi, Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

George Hills, Franco: the Man and his Nation (New York: Macmillan, 1967)

Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Some Reflections on the New History’, The American Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 3 (1989)

Cornelius Holtorf, Monumental Past (1998): https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/index.html

Pierre Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire’, Representations, no 26 (1989)

Paul Preston, Franco (London: Harper Collins, 1993)

Arthur P. Whitaker, Spain and the Defense of the West: Ally and Liability (New York: Harper, 1961)