On November 14, the plenary session of the Moncloa-Aravaca Municipal Board approved changing the name of Avenida de la Memoria, located in Moncloa, to Avenida de la Concordia. As is usual in this legislature, the measure was approved with the vote in favor of the PP and VOX and the negative of PSOE and Más Madrid.
The debate in the Plenary of the Moncloa-Aravaca district began with a curious statement from the Councilor-President of the district, Borja Fanjul (PP): “We are not in favor of changing the name of the streets, this is a street that does not affect to any neighbor, we are not here to remember victims of one side or the other of the civil war. We want to turn the page, we want to honor the spirit of ’78, of the Spanish Constitution.”
During the debate prior to the vote, PSOE and Más Madrid considered the change unnecessary, while the PP spokesperson said that “the Avenida de la Memoria was born as a divisive imposition,” referring to the “sectarian and partisan politics started by Mr. Shoemaker”. Fanjul, for his part, added in conclusion that “the Democratic Memory Law has been drafted by Bildu.”
The avenue was called Victory since its construction in 1947, it changed its name to Avenida del Arco de la Victoria between 1999 and 2017 and was renamed Avenida de la Memoria with the Ahora Madrid City Council. It seems that until soon, although the name change will have to pass the filter of the Plenary of Cibeles before becoming effective.
The Calles Dignas-Justa Freire Platform and the Platform in Defense of the Memorial immediately released a statement criticizing the decision. “Concordia is a dignified name that cannot be used in an interested way to replace another of the same dignity such as memory. According to the Royal Academy of Language, concord is a concept that arises from conformity, union or adjustment or agreement between people who contend or litigate. That is, a concept that gives meaning to a process in which two parties agree on a story based on the truth and therefore on the recovery of the memory of what happened,” they said in the text.
What the associations argue is that in Spain there has never been a process aimed at achieving the truth and reparation for the victims of the dictatorship. “In this context, the Avenue of Memory is not just a name, but a symbol of society’s commitment to justice and the dignity of the victims,” they concluded their statement.
Additionally, the platforms provide a technical reason to oppose the name of the road: there is already a street with the name of Concordia in the district of Puente de Vallecas, although the Madrid street map offers other examples of coincident names when the type of road changes. (street, walk, avenue, etc.).
Sandra Ladra, councilor for Más Madrid, has described Fanjul’s proposal as “infamous” and as “an excuse to prevent the forced and urgent resignification of the urban and architectural complex in the Plaza de la Moncloa area.”
In the opinion of the memorialist movements, what the right’s position ignores in this case is the Francoist nature per se of the space, beyond its name. The change, they believe, would mean placing a space connoted by Francoism on a plane equidistant from the victims of the coup d’état and the dictatorship, denying the connection between memory and reparation, replacing justice with the photogenic concept of concord.
After the war, the University City became a kind of fetish territory of the first Franco regime due to its status as a battlefield. The new rebuilt university was to be a figurehead of the regime and to be covered in monumentality. Pedro Bidagor, architect of the reconstruction and in charge of designing the city of the victors, saw the plan to make a large monumental front in the Argüelles neighborhood frustrated, which would include the Party House on the site of the Cuartel de la Montaña and would extend along Paseo de Rosales, Parque del Oeste and Ciudad Universitaria. The economic reality of the country prevented it but, from the project, the entrance to Madrid of the Plaza de la Moncloa with the Ministry of Air of Gutiérrez Soto, which ended up condensing the grandiloquence of the Falangist architectural project, remained.
The initial project of the Roman-style arch, which served as access to the Vía de la Victoria and the University City itself, was presented in 1943 by the architects López Otero and Pascual Bravo. The set must have included the equestrian statue of Franco by the sculptor José Capuz. The surrounding works were delayed until 1950 and the monument was inaugurated on July 18, 1956. By then, the regime had reduced the intensity of its symbolic imposition on the defeated and Francisco Franco himself preferred to avoid his stony presence in the monument. The statue, however, was placed in the Nuevos Ministerios, where it remained until 2005 when it was moved to a municipal warehouse.
In the semantic field of Francoism, the word victory was not merely descriptive, it must be understood as the humiliating demonstration of the Victory parade of May 19, 1939 and those of the following years. Among the inscriptions on the arch it reads “to the armies here victorious” (ARMIS HIC VICTRICIBVS). It is worth remembering that that first Victory Parade were in Madrid, along with Franco’s army, those of Hitler and Mussolini.
Reconciliation is not a term that appeared for the first time with the Transition either; it was used since the late 1950s, both by the opposition to the regime (embodied in the politics of national reconciliation of the PCE) and by the Franco regime itself. What the historical memory movement began to demand in the first decade of the 21st century was to break the plug on democratic recognition of victims, placed in the name of an asymmetric concept of reconciliation that made fortunes during the transition to democracy. Paradigmatically, Vox deputy Manuel Mariscal recently said in the Congress of Deputies that the post-war stage was “one of reconstruction, progress and reconciliation to achieve national unity.”
Last year, the Madrid City Council announced the signing of an agreement with the Complutense University – in whose domain the triumphal arch is located – to restore and take care of its maintenance. In the City Council’s Budget project for 2025, an expenditure of 75,000 euros is planned for “repair and improvement works” of the Victory Arch, money that does not seem enough to give cultural use to the vaulted room that houses the complex already. its viewpoint, which seems to be the intentions of the City Council.
The Victory Arch has been a hot potato for the Complutense University of Madrid for many years due to its Francoist connotations. A problem that transcends its local character. Last May, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) registered a letter addressed to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, requesting the dismantling of the arch. The Madrid City Council was then quick to remind that dismantling is not a possible scenario because the monument is classified as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC).
Once again, and coinciding with the fact that the City Council has assumed part of its guardianship, what some call the last arch of fascist triumph in Europe has become a political battlefield, this time through the name of the avenue that contains it. In the next chapter, the debate will move to the major leagues of the city, the Plane of Cybele.
Source: www.eldiario.es
