As Spain’s contentious election season races toward its conclusion on Sunday, one small group of Spaniards is undoubtedly anticipating its outcome with particular interest. They would be the 33 families who, effective October 21, 2022, lost hereditary titles of nobility bestowed on their near ancestors during or just after Francisco Franco’s rule as Spain’s head of state, which lasted from 1939 to 1975. According to the Democratic Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Democrática) passed by Spain’s far-left government last fall, their titles were officially “suppressed,” along with other public symbols and objects believed to “exalt” Franco, his government, and the civil war that brought him to power.
Aware of his mortality, and sensitive to the political vacuum that his death could potentially create, as early as 1947 Franco declared Spain to be a monarchy again, reversing its abolition after King Alfonso XIII’s ouster in 1931. Franco also restored Spain’s nobility, which had been legally abolished along with the monarchy. He took the unique title of Caudillo and stipulated that he would choose his successor, either a new king selected from Spain’s dethroned royal family (Alfonso XIII had died in exile in 1941), or a regent who would continue to lead a monarchy without a monarch. Franco’s prerogatives as lifetime ruler included awarding new titles of nobility to those he found deserving for their service to the Spanish state. Most were conferred upon military and political leaders whose actions, often taken at great personal risk, arguably saved Spain from descent into the hell of communism, which severely tainted the unstable and Soviet-influenced Spanish Republic that Franco overthrew.
In 1969, Franco chose as his successor Prince Juan Carlos, a grandson of Alfonso XIII, who presided effectively over Spain’s transition from authoritarian dictatorship to constitutional monarchy. A national Pact of Forgetting (Pacto del Olvido) and a universal amnesty law passed in 1977 not only helped ensure domestic stability, but also served as an example for other countries emerging from civil conflicts or transitioning from dictatorship to democracy.
Lately, however, the successful post-Franco settlement has come under attack. In 2007, a leftist government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, of Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party, passed the Historical Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Histórica), which officially condemned Franco’s rule while nevertheless recognizing that there had been victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War. The law also instituted some restorative measures for leftists who suffered under Franco and their descendants. It also included a provision to remove from public spaces objects and symbols believed to ‘exalt’ Franco, his government, or actions during the civil war.
Most of these provisions fell by the wayside under Mariano Rajoy’s center-right government of 2011-2018, which failed to implement or simply declined to fund the requisite measures. The return of the Socialist Workers’ Party at the head of a minority government in 2018 launched a giant leap forward. Under Pedro Sánchez, who will likely be unseated as prime minister this weekend, the Spanish Left adopted a much stronger anti-Franco animus. In practice, this meant the quick removal of monuments to the late leader and his regime. By February 2021, virtually every statue of Franco in Spain was removed from public display (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, still has one statue of Franco that survives on the basis of its artistic value). After prolonged legal wrangling following a special parliamentary vote, in October 2019 Franco’s mortal remains were removed from his monumental tomb in the Valley of the Fallen, a huge burial complex outside Madrid, and reinterred in the much less prominent municipal cemetery where his widow was buried.
The enhanced Democratic Memory Law voided all politically-motivated criminal convictions under Franco’s rule (all or virtually all now posthumous), albeit without any right to compensation. A close reading of the law suggests that it may also limit free inquiry and critical commentary on controversial aspects of the Left’s role in the civil war. The law specifically proscribes pro-Franco and pro-authoritarian speech, possibly including praise even for non-political or purely civic projects and accomplishments. Violations can be sanctioned with fines of up to 150,000 euros. There is, however, no equivalent prohibition on praise for communism, socialism, anarchism, or violence committed by adherents of those ideologies.
The law’s most peculiar provision targets living people. The Francoist nobility was collectively singled out for extirpation, and its heads of family found themselves officially ‘disennobled’ the moment the law came into effect last October. The text of the law specifically states that it “suppresses” all titles bestowed between 1948, when Franco began granting them, and 1978, when the last ennoblements of Franco-era figures were granted by King Juan Carlos.
None of the individuals who originally held the Franco-era titles is still alive; most are now held by third or fourth-generation descendants who had no role in Franco’s regime and in some cases were not alive during it. Indeed, one of Franco’s first creations was the dukedom posthumously conferred on the monarchist politician José Calvo Sotelo, who was murdered by leftist militants in 1936, prior to the civil war. Sotelo was not alive to play any role in either Franco’s regime or the uprising, nor is he believed even to have had any knowledge of the military’s plan. No matter—almost a century later, his family has been targeted for a new round of victimization by the radical Left, and his 75-year old grandson, who was born after the civil war, is no longer a duke.
The same fate befell the dukedom posthumously conferred on the political thinker José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was imprisoned during the events of 1936 and likewise took no part in them for the good reason that he was incarcerated. Later that year, he was convicted on bogus charges and then judicially murdered by the republican regime despite a plea from his own kangaroo court for his death sentence to be commuted. The dukedom was eventually inherited by Primo de Rivera’s nephew, a politician and diplomat who played a major role in facilitating Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s and later served as a senator. But that man’s son, who inherited the title in 2018, is also no longer a duke because his long dead great-uncle’s political beliefs are now officially disfavored.
The comital title of Castillo de la Mota, conferred upon Primo de Rivera’s sister Pilar in 1960, is also gone, although its original holder’s main occupation was promoting women’s causes, including humanitarian advocacy for the widows of Franco’s republican opponents. But her great-nephew and heir is no longer a count because having had the wrong relatives is too grave an offense for the contemporary Spanish Left to countenance.
This is also true, of course, if your name happens to be Franco, even though both titles created for the Caudillo’s surviving family members were conferred after his death. The Lordship of Meirás, conferred upon Franco’s widow six days after his death and last held by his grandson Francis, is gone, even though neither holder of the title played any role in politics. The Dukedom of Franco, granted by Juan Carlos to Franco’s daughter, and later inherited by her daughter in turn, is also gone despite both duchesses’ lack of any political role. Once again, the motive is little more than the radical Left’s vindictive desire to blot out any memory of their more famous progenitor.
Even titled families that have died out are no longer considered worthy of public memory if they are associated with Franco. The Dukedom of Carrera Blanco was conferred posthumously in 1973 upon the Catholic integralist politician Luis Carrera Blanco, shortly after his assassination by terrorists belonging to the left-wing Basque separatist organization, the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna). His son held the title until his death in 2019 and left no heirs. But under the Democratic Memory Law, the extinct dukedom was ‘suppressed’ anyway because Carrera Blanco had served as Franco’s head of government for six months before his murder. In a notable double standard, Sánchez’s government has ruled in coalition with the Basque separatist party EH Bildu. This party’s leader, Arnaldo Otegi, is an unapologetic former ETA militant who served 14 years in prison for kidnapping and belonging to an illegal armed organization before embarking on his parliamentary career.
The fate of the Francoist nobility may seem little more than a curiosity. It comprises only a tiny percentage of the more than 2,800 extant noble families in Spain today and, like them, there were no legal privileges attached to status, title, or the distinction of ‘grandeeship’ (grandeza), an ancient honorific category that Franco bestowed on a number of his creations. No Francoist noble plays any noteworthy role in Spanish public life today, and they are not known to have any collective organization or identity, as Irish or Jacobite peers or Napoleonic nobles might have. Many of the families intermarried with the older Spanish nobility, from which they are indistinguishable apart from their recent stigmatization by their government. Francis Franco may have lost his lordship, but he remains the 11th Marquess of Villaverde, having inherited the title from his father, the Caudillo’s son-in-law, in 1998. Franco’s granddaughter, who lives quietly in Portugal, had as her heir to the Dukedom of Franco her son Luis de Borbón, the titular Duc d’Anjou, who is the widely recognized legitimist pretender to the vacant French throne as Louis XX.
What the Francoist nobles do have in common is that their government changed their personal status without their consent and subjected them and their heirs to significant civil sanction on the basis of birth. These measures almost certainly violate Spain’s amnesty law of 1977, which barred sanctions against any individual on either side of Spain’s civil war-era political divide, and, probably, Spanish and European Union civil and human rights laws.
These possible legal violations are significant. In numerous countries, amnesty laws have been highly effective inducements to convince authoritarian regimes to democratize, even though, especially in Hispanophone nations, radical leftists and globalist judicial authorities have caused them to be withdrawn later. With more such precedents, future democratic transitions may well be imperiled as authoritarian regimes come to doubt the durability of any proffered amnesty. Even worse, conceding personal status to government fiat, even for a small number of people for one particular reason, had a much uglier history in 20th century Europe than anything Franco did.
In the eight months since the law was implemented, no affected individuals or family members have appeared in the searchable public record to contest or even discuss their disennoblements. In the face of a radical leftist government, doing so may be unwise. It is unknown whether any will take legal action to reverse the law as it applies to them. Fortunately, they may not have to. Spain’s right-wing parties deplore the law as a whole. Former center-right People’s Party leader Pablo Casado, whose party will likely form the next government, has publicly castigated it, arguing that all it has done is “dig up grudges.” The right-wing VOX Party, which is likely to be a coalition partner in that government, has pledged to repeal the law if it comes to power, presumably reversing the abolition of the Francoist titles. For the sake of Spain’s continuing stability, the new government should do so, and also find the courage to admit that honoring the families of brave men who saved Spain from a dangerously flawed republic likely to fall to communism is no demerit, especially when the new regime promised them amnesty in good faith.
