Awkward monuments and being a foreigner. Madrid’s Arco de la Victoria
Madrid’s contentious monument: Arco de La Victoria
I originally wrote this post last winter while living in Madrid. I’ve sat on it for a while now without knowing what to do with it, so I eventually uploaded it here. It’s a bit different to what I normally write — it’s slightly more political and historical. I would be interested to hear peoples’ thoughts on it…
Nearly a year ago, me and a couple of friends climbed over a busy motorway opposite the large Moncloa transport interchange in Madrid to skate while I stood around watching them on a cold January night. After dodging through the city centre bound traffic lane of the A-6 motorway, we found ourselves in a barren traffic island with a looming monument arch set in the middle.
The floor was littered with broken bottles and discarded wooden pallets which other skaters had used to make ramps. The pave-stones that surround the arch were in various degrees of disintegration and the arch itself had missing pieces of stonework. Somehow the site the felt more like a derelict factory than a monument in a wealthy central area of a major European capital.
I was struck by how large it was; I began to wonder how could such a grand monument could lie in such a state of disrepair. Comparable arches in Madrid, such as the Puerta de Toledo, have a sparkling feel as if they are freshly polished by council employees in the early hours of each morning. My eyes were led to the Latin inscriptions on the top and the date MCMXXXIX or 1939. The year which former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War. Taking into account the awkward space relics from the dictatorship occupy in modern Spain, the monument’s decrepit magnificence suddenly made sense.
Over the following year, I began to develop a strange kind of curiosity for this monument from Spain’s authoritarian dictatorship and began to research it heavily. I suppose this curiosity was similar to the kind that drives people to devour true-crime documentaries about murderers. I saw the arch as a window into a fascinating history, alluringly different to the one I grew up with in Britain.
An awkward arch
The arch, called Arco de la Victoria, stands at 49 metres, just a metre shorter than Paris’s famous Arc de Triomphe and was erected in 1956 at the request of Franco to commemorate the 1936 Battle of Ciudad Universitaria, seen as a crucial turning point in the monarchists’ favour during the Civil War. In the battle, Nationalists under Franco’s command fought against Republican forces then in control of Madrid. Ciudad Universitaria is the city’s university district and is just a stone’s throw from the arch.
The battle was Franco’s first attempt to take the city of Madrid early on in the Civil War and was also one of the first times in history where aerial bombardment was employed as a tactic against a civilian population when Spanish Nationalist and Nazi planes dropped bombs on the city’s inhabitants. Like most war monuments, the arch stands for the pointless deaths of thousands of people, re-interpreting their deaths as meaningful according to the values that underlay the political order of the time of its construction. Because of its association with aerial bombardment, the arch is an eerie marker for the tactic that has killed millions of civilians since
Interestingly, viewing the battle from a ‘win or lose’ perspective, it is difficult to see how the Nationalists definitively ‘won’ the battle. Their objective of taking Madrid failed and they did not manage to eventually do so until two years later. While suffering heavy losses, the Republicans repelled the assault on the city. Of course, Franco’s propaganda machine spun the battle as a decisive victory in its narrative of the war.
A divided history
For me, the monument stands as awkward reminder to a highly contentious part of Spanish history, which many politicians — on the right especially — gloss over, supposedly for fear of “reopening old wounds.” However, this ‘fear’ is often mobilised — mostly by right-wing politicians — to protect nostalgic relics of a bygone era where order ruled with an iron fist.
As a foreigner without such restraints, I see this history through the lens of a religious, political and class struggle between Spain’s left and right which I see reflected in daily news stories. Spain’s two major political parties, the PP and PSOE both have long histories, shaped by the country’s authoritarian past. PSOE, traditionally left-wing, is the same socialist party that Franco conducted a coup against in 1936, albeit now taking a far more centre-left position. The PP, on the other hand, was formed by cabinet ministers in Franco’s government after his death. There is now a newcomer in this fight; Vox, a far right party which is riding a wave of anti-feminist and nationalist sentiment and rising in popularity across the country.
Although Vox might seem to have more to do with the modern phenomenon of the European far-right than with the old dictatorship, the party unashamedly celebrates Francoist Spain. In recent elections in 2019, this party doubled their share of the Spanish congress.
In reality, I know that the situation is messier, more convoluted than this, but in a country where I am a foreigner it is easier to form trends out of the little information I receive and even less that I fully understand. I have to fill in the gaps and invent connections to form an opinion.
Debates around the arch reflect a left-right political division. Every 10 years or so the arch becomes a hot talking point in the political sections of Spanish newspapers. In 2004, the Chancellor of the nearby Complutense University and Madrid’s then PSOE mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallardón agreed to change the arch’s name to Arco de la Concordia — in English “Harmony Arch” — after a motion to change its name was rejected in the town hall by the PP, but this never happened. Most recently, the left-wing Valencian party Compromís asked the then governing PP to tear the arch down in 2016. A Compromís senator said rhetorically, “Could anyone imagine in Berlin an arch commemorating the arrival of Hitler still standing?” Nothing was done.
For those who want the arch torn down, one of the main obstacles is the wording of Spain’s historical memory act. This legislation, introduced by a PSOE government in 2007, formally condemned the Francoist regime and introduced several measures to weaken the presence of the dictatorship in Spain, including the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings and spaces. However, there are exceptions for architecturally or historically significant sites, which probably encompass the arch. This makes it difficult to apply the law in favour of the arch’s destruction. There are many on the left who argue that the historical memory act doesn’t go far enough to help the country deal with its horrific past as well as those on the right who argue.
There is a further question of whether its destruction would actually be beneficial.
Of course I feel like the victory it commemorates and the subsequent dictatorship should not be celebrated with a monument. However, I wonder what would tearing down the arch really improve. As far as I know, the arch does not serve as a place where followers of Franco gather to remember him. Nor is it a tourist destination where tourists come to get a taste of this complex part of Spanish history, which has become a feature in many places with chequered histories, a case in point being the numerous — and sometimes ethically contentious - Pablo Escobar tours in the Colombian city of Medellin. It hasn’t received any restoration work since 1987 and this is very clear when you arrive.
As it stands, the arch acts as an object through which knowledge about the past is mediated. The meaning of the monument is therefore different according to the person who is observing the arch. To the hardcore right winger who glorifies the Franco dictatorship, the arch could symbolise the victory of Franco’s crusade against the anarchy and godlessness of Spain’s Second Republic, the elected left-wing government Franco overthrew. To others it might evoke relatives lost during the Civil War and their suffering or that of their family during the regime years. Others are likely not to know about the monument’s significance; it might just be that large arch they pass on their way in and out of Madrid while barely noticing it. I think that the arch’s potential purpose lies in its ambiguity — it can help people come to an understanding about their own opinion on Spain’s past. It becomes a way of confronting and acknowledging a past that is very much alive, in spite of a sometimes feigned consensus to forget.
Destroying the arch or changing it would be an attempt to control history, reminiscent of the frequent regulating and redressing of the truth that was a key hallmark of the dictatorship. The act of destruction would recall the tactics of the very era it would attempt to erase.
In its current state of dilapidation, the arch seems to embody the stain of the past rather than celebrate its supposed glory. I could see the arch’s destruction serving someone’s political goal rather than being carried out in the hope of justice or reconciliation. When politicians get involved in controlling history, they frequently weaponise it. Perhaps tearing the arch down would be an attempt to erase the memory of the dictatorship and the Civil War from this corner of Madrid, narrowing the range of possible perspectives one can develop on the war. Allowing space to broaden the range of potential opinions on the past serves as the best prevention for future reactionary movements.
This said, there are cases with contentious monuments from Spain’s past where I think political intervention is needed. When he died, the Spanish dictator Franco was buried in a large self-built mausoleum standing over El Valle de los Caidos (The Valley of the Fallen) in the mountains to the north of Madrid. The valley is a mass war grave where 33,000 soldiers from both sides of the Civil War are buried, crowned by a 150 metre tall cross that can be seen from Madrid on a clear day. Soldiers whose deaths can be attributed to Franco were literally buried in the shadow of his mausoleum. The monument in the valley was constructed with the help of an estimated 20,000 Republican prisoners and political prisoners. Last October, Franco was exhumed and reburied in a family mausoleum in the El Pardo suburb in Madrid after a two year long political process.
Franco’s exhumation was long overdue. While Franco remained in El Valle de los Caidos, the former dictator was effectively celebrated because it afforded him a kind of status that would never be awarded to a normal leader. Even the Spanish royal family doesn’t build a separate mausoleum for each king or queen that dies.
Moving him was a positive step — he now lies in an unceremonious place, more fitting for a tyrant who killed thousands and ruined the lives of many more. After 40 years, he eventually lies to rest in a tomb that doesn’t celebrate his memory. No country except Cambodia has more people believed to be buried in unmarked war graves. There are an estimated 100,000 such graves in Spain. It was high time that the highly visible grave of the man responsible for many of these hidden graves was made slightly harder to see.
Perspectives on a pale shadow
Spain’s authoritarian past still casts a pale shadow over the county. A colleague of mine in her mid-twenties told me she was never taught about the Civil War in school. She said the history curriculum ran up to 1936, where it abruptly stopped. She said that she thinks Civil War was still considered too contentious to be taught, but she felt that soon they may begin to teach it. The Civil War is in fact taught at Bachillerato (16–18 years old) where complete units are offered on the subject.
I see this shadow everyday. I work in an upper class and generally right-wing voting area of Madrid and today I passed several stickers saying “Thank you Franco for saving Spain from communism” and others with a photo of Spain’s PSOE president Pedro Sanchez who ordered Franco’s exhumation with the text “Desecrator of graves”. I see young children wearing Vox wristbands going to school.
In this context of a growing right, recognising this pale shadow is more important than ever. The ‘ghost’ of the dictatorship haunts the country in many ways. Acknowledging the possibility for multiple perspectives on this ghost is essential if Spain is to expand the range of possible interpretations of its difficult past. Narrow framings of the past automatically assert a version of the past as true and right to believe. Herein lies the potential of ambiguous objects like the arch to develop wider perspectives on difficult histories.
The widening of perspectives is perhaps history’s greatest ‘use’. Narrow, closed discourses on the past are utilised in humanity’s worst moments as a motivator and justification for exclusion and violence. Facilitating wider, more open discursive spaces for contentious histories is perhaps the best antidote for those awful times when history seems to repeat itself.
