The citizen-driven historical memory movement came into being at the turn of the millennium, and as public pressure grew, the Spanish government under the center-left prime minister at the time, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, passed a “law of historical memory” in 2007, lending government support and funding to excavation, commemoration and reburial. Many on the right accused Mr. Zapatero of politicizing tragedy and reopening old wounds, while historical memory campaigners felt the legislation had been watered down.

When the right-wing People’s Party won the election in 2011, the new prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, promptly defunded the project and closed the Office of Victims of the Civil War and the Dictatorship. The Spanish people, Mr. Rajoy had said in 2008, would have to “look to the future, and generate neither tension nor division.”

It may sound like a noble sentiment in isolation, but it is disingenuous. Spain is no more able to escape its past than any other country, and historical memory is not just an interest of Spain’s defeated left. Under Franco’s dictatorship, the winners in the civil war not only spent 36 years writing the history of their victory, teaching it in schools and enshrining it in popular culture, but also left exactly the kind of solemn monuments to their dead that have been denied to the missing 114,000. The most profound and awe-inspiring example of these is Franco’s final resting place, the Valley of the Fallen. It is a basilica topped by the largest memorial cross in the world, at nearly 500 feet high — and is the site of annual commemorations by the far right, dressed in fascist uniforms, on the anniversary of Franco’s death.

As a new generation of fascists gains influence with governments from the United States to Hungary, it may be the source of some surprise that Spain has no equivalent to Greece’s Golden Dawn or France’s National Front, especially given the desperate and long-lasting effects of the economic crisis in Spain. In part the absence of a major contemporary Spanish far-right party is a legacy of the civil war and dictatorship, and the mass killings that ensued, which loom over the country to this day. In part — and this is the other reason Mr. Rajoy would prefer to look to the future — it is because the governing Popular Party absorbed much of the Francoist political machinery. The party’s founder, Manuel Fraga, had been a government minister under Franco.