The Pact of Forgetting (Spanish: el pacto del olvido) is the Spanish political decision (by both the leftist and rightist parties) to avoid dealing with the legacy of Francoism after the 1975 death of General Francisco Franco, who had remained in power since the Spanish Civil War in 1936–1939. The Pact of Forgetting was an attempt to put the past behind them and concentrate on the future of Spain.
In making a smooth transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, the pact ensured that there were no prosecutions for persons responsible for mass suffering. On the other hand, Francoist public memorials, such as the mausoleum of the Valley of the Fallen, fell into disuse for official occasions. Also, the celebration of "Day of Victory" during the Franco era was changed to "Armed Forces Day" so respect was paid to both Nationalist and Republican parties of the Civil War.
The pact underpinned the transition to democracy of the 1970s and ensured that difficult questions about the recent past were suppressed for fear of endangering 'national reconciliation' and the restoration of liberal-democratic freedoms. Responsibility for the Spanish Civil War, and for the repression that followed, was not to be placed upon any particular social or political group. "In practice, this presupposed suppressing painful memories derived from the dictatorship's division of the population into 'victors' and 'vanquished'. While many historians accept that the pact served a purpose at the time of transition, there is more controversy as to whether it should still be adhered to. Paul Preston takes the view that Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from "looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way".
"It is estimated that 400,000 people spent time in prisons, camps, or forced labor battalions". Some historians believe that the repression of the Franco dictatorship was most severe and prevalent in the immediate years after the Spanish Civil War and through the 1940s. During this time of the repression, there was an escalation of torture, illegal detention, and execution. This style of repression remained frequent up until the end of the Franco dictatorship. Especially during 1936–1939, Nationalist Forces seized control of cities and towns in the Franco-led military coup and would hunt down any protesters or those who were labeled as a threat to the government and believed to sympathize with the Republican cause. "Waves of these individuals were condemned on mere hearsay without trial, loaded onto trucks, taken to deserted areas outside city boundaries, summarily shot, and buried in mass, shallow graves that began dotting the Spanish countryside in the wake of the advancing Nationalist."