Cruces de memoria y olvido

The Franco regime never wanted to forget the civil war and, from the beginning of the dictatorship, that memory materialized in thousands of monuments erected in towns and cities throughout the country. Under the control of the authorities, the myth of those "fallen for God and for Spain" established the dichotomy between the good and the bad Spaniards, subjected and unified memory to partisan and nationalizing political purposes, extolled and legitimized the dictator, determined the public space and even the materials to be used, and established his aesthetic, political and ideological ideal in the Cuelgamuros mausoleum. Through an enormous and diverse documentation, the historian Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco reconstructs both the specific history of those monuments scattered throughout the country, as well as their role in the propaganda and manipulative Francoist memory of the civil war, whose traces -physical and ideological- have conditioned the story, the memory and the landscape of the contemporary history of Spain.