ABSTRACT
Up to now, we have focused upon the origins of the myth of the fallen and its political utility. We have interrogated the construction and aesthetic of monuments to the fallen under Francoism, their use after 1939, as well as the case of the ‘national’ monument to the fallen, El Valle de los Caídos. The remaining chapters will explore the life of the crosses to the fallen as the myth diminished, and indeed, as they began to provoke opposition from some sectors of the population by the end of the Franco regime, and in the years since the return of democracy to Spain. Of course, even under Francoism, as we have already seen, memory was never fixed and was constantly in flux. Spanish society changed and became ever more diverse in the latter part of the Franco regime and the first decades of democracy. It had, quite simply, moved beyond the confines of the post-war ‘culture of victory’ and the early, rigid memory of the civil war. The monuments to the fallen offer an invaluable insight into these shifts. Not only do they allow us to explore the decline in the power of the myth of the fallen. They also highlight conflicts, which ostensibly erupted in response to them, but which speak to changing individual, social, and national memories. Likewise, understanding what happened to the monuments since the arrival of democracy gives us insights into much broader questions of memory in contemporary Spain.
