The Guardian view on General Franco’s exhumation: a Spanish lesson in memory | Editorial
Briefly, fog threatened to disrupt General Francisco Franco's final, unscheduled journey . Then the sky cleared and a helicopter was able to carry the dictator's coffin away from the Valley of the Fallen, Europe's most unloved war memorial. After 16 months of wrangling over Franco's exhumation, the ceremonies of departure were performed with a dignity not accorded to the 100,000 victims of Spain's 1936-39 civil war who still lie in unmarked graves. A reburial was performed in a private ceremony at the family mausoleum north of Madrid, where Franco now lies next to his wife, Carmen.
This symbolic settling of accounts with a dead dictator might have seemed a touch macabre, but it was necessary. Spain's socialist prime minister, Pedro Sinchez, was correct to say the country had fulfilled a duty to itself by removing Franco from the triumphalist, overbearing memorial he created as "a national monument of atonement", after the civil war. The Valley of the Fallen, with its basilica and 150m high cross, was built in 1940 in part by the forced labour of an estimated 20,000 political prisoners. It contains almost 34,000 corpses, including thousands of Franco's republican victims, interred there en masse without permission and inaccessible to relatives. With Franco buried at its heart after his death in 1975, it became a nationalist shrine, and focus of nostalgia for the far right; a monument to division rather than reconciliation.
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