But there is also another answer: a less logical but truer answer, and also more complex. The answer is that theory is one thing and practice quite another: in theory the general never renounced the 18 July uprising, and, like any other military man of his generation, perhaps he never even renounced Francisco Franco; in practice, however, and at least from the moment Adolfo Suárez brought him into politics and put him in charge of military affairs for his government, the general did nothing but renounce Francisco Franco and the uprising of 18 July.
Let me explain. A historiographical cliché has it that the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was possible thanks to a pact of forgetting. It’s a lie; or, what amounts to the same thing, it’s a fragmentary truth, which only begins to be completed by a contrary cliché: the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was possible thanks to a pact of remembering. Speaking in general, the transition — the historical period we know by that misleading name, which suggests the falsehood that democracy was an inevitable consequence of Francoism and not the result of a willed and improvised series of chances enabled by the decrepitude of the dictatorship — was a pact by which the vanquished of the Civil War agreed not to settle scores for what had happened during forty-three years of war and dictatorship, while, in compensation, after forty-three years of settling scores with the defeated, the victors accepted the creation of a political system that admitted both sides and was essentially identical to the system brought down by the war. That pact did not include forgetting the past: it included shelving it, avoiding it, setting it aside; it included agreeing not to use it politically, but it didn’t include forgetting it. From the point of view of justice, the pact contained an error, because it meant shelving, avoiding or setting aside the fact that those ultimately responsible for the war were those who won it, who provoked it with a coup d’état against a democratic regime, and because it also meant relinquishing any compensation for the victims and the prosecution of those responsible for an ignominious settling of scores that included a plan to exterminate the defeated; but, from the political point of view — even from the point of view of political ethics — the pact was a wise move, because its result was a political victory for the defeated, who restored a system essentially identical to that which they’d defended in the war (though one was called a republic and the other a monarchy, both were parliamentary democracies), and because maybe the moral error would have been to try to settle scores with those who had committed the error of settling scores, adding ignominy to ignominy: that is at least what the politicians who made the transition thought, as if they’d all read Max Weber and thought like him that there was nothing ethically more abject than to practise spurious ethics that seek only to be right, ethics that, ‘instead of being concerned with what the politician is interested in, the future and the responsibility towards that future, are concerned with politically sterile questions of past guilt’, and which, falling into this guilty indignity, ‘overlook the unavoidable falsification of the whole problem’, a falsification that is the result of the predatory interest of victors and vanquished in obtaining moral and material advantages and for others to confess their guilt. In any case, if the politicians of the transition were able to fulfil the pact that this involved, not making use of the past in political combat, it was not because they’d forgotten it, but because they remembered it very welclass="underline" because they remembered and they decided that it was undignified and abject to settle scores with the past in order to be right at the risk of mutilating the future, perhaps of submerging the country in another civil war. During the transition few people in Spain forgot, and the memory of the war was more present than ever in the memory of the political class and the population in general; that is precisely one of the reasons why no one or hardly anyone opposed the 23 February coup: during those years everyone wanted to avoid at any price the risk of repeating the savage orgy of bloodletting that had happened forty years earlier, and everyone transmitted that desire to a political class that was only its reflection. It was not a heroic desire, anxious for justice (or apocalypse); it was just a brave and reasonable bourgeois desire, and the political class fulfilled it, bravely and reasonably: although in the autumn and winter of 1980 the political class behaved with an irresponsibility that verged on sending the country back to barbarism, between 1976 and 1980 it was much less incompetent than its last two centuries of history might have predicted. All this is valid, especially, for the generation that had fought the war and conspired for such a thing never to happen again. All this is valid, without doubt, for General Gutiérrez Mellado, who, no matter what he said in public, at least since his arrival in government always acted like someone who rejected in advance being right or having been in the right, that is he acted as if he knew the truth: that the democracy he was helping to construct was essentially identical to the one he’d helped to destroy forty years earlier, and that he was in his way responsible for the catastrophe of the war. From that point, as if the general were also a hero of the retreat — a professional of renunciation and demolition who abandons his positions undermining himself — all his political accomplishments were directed, not at arguing over or recognizing his guilt, but at atoning for it, assuming responsibility for preventing another 18 July and dismantling, to prevent it, the army that had provoked it: his own army, the Army of the Victory, Francisco Franco’s Army. And from there as well — besides a gesture of courage and grace and rebellion, besides a supreme gesture of liberty, a posthumous gesture and a military gesture — his gesture of confronting the rebel Civil Guards in the chamber of the Cortes can be understood not only as a way of gaining a definitive pardon for the sins of his youth, but also as a summary or emblem of his two main aims over the five years since Adolfo Suárez named him Deputy Prime Minister and put him in charge of his government’s defence policies: to subjugate military power to civilian power and to protect the Prime Minister from the fury of his comrades-in-arms.