Resurrecting Democracy Becoming European: An Ethnographic Analysis of Spanish Civil War Exhumations

Since 2000, a loose coalition of victims’ relatives, academics, and activists – popularly known as the “historical memory movement” – has dedicated itself to locating, exhuming, and honoring those who died in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). In this paper, I seek to demonstrate that such interventions are about far more than simply recovering human remains and returning them to living kin; they are also about resurrecting the ideas for which these people were murdered and applying those lessons to the contemporary moment.

On the one hand, I look at the ways exhumations produce a critique of post-fascist Spain as “tremendously backwards,” especially when compared with their European neighbors. First, civil society organizations contrast their own financial scarcity with the well-funded internationally led exhumations that took place in the former-Yugoslavia. In addition, Spanish activists contrast the banality of Franco’s continuing presence in the contemporary Spanish public sphere with the continuing condemnation of the Nazi regime in Germany. The result is a view of Spain that is “tremendously backwards” and incompletely European.

Second, I look at the ways the dead provide a model for democratic governance capable of addressing the current faults in Spanish democracy. Depending on the activist groups, these resurrected lessons from the past can range from the humanistic and universalistic to particular programs of political and economic reform. Understanding the politics that emerge from forensic exhumations thus requires us to pay attention to how the dead continue participating in the public sphere.