Complutense University of Madrid - Forty Years of Political Opposition

Forty Years of Political Opposition

At war's end in 1939, over 40% of the original campus was completely levelled, and all of the buildings showed significant damage. For a time the Francoist victors of the war considered leaving the area as it was, a virtual moonscape. It was eventually decided, however, that the area should be restored and rehabilitated as a symbol of the new regime, albeit with some alterations – chief amongst them the new plans for a monumental main building with a Sistine Chapel-type interior, and a large church. While those two particular plans never came to fruition, the direct involvement of Franco in the rebuilding of the University meant that, though the original plans were largely followed, chapels were now incorporated into each of the buildings. Today, this creates a curiously contradictory situation, whereby one has certain buildings, such as the School of Philosophy, with streamlined architecture that epitomizes the liberal spirit of the 1920s and borrows heavily from Weimar Germany, and yet features a first-floor chapel which, fitted into a highly art-deco setting, seems implausible as a place of serious spiritual reflection.

Franco's influence on-campus was not limited to the imposition of his Catholic ideals. As a result of the war, as could be expected, the staff was purged of all liberals and Republican sympathizers, and replaced with members of the Falangist movement. What's more, the University charters were altered to compel all students to reside either in government-sanctioned dormitories or personal family homes. The dormitories staffed with members of the falangist movement, the regime aspired to be able to oversee all aspects of the student's lives, hoping to mold them into devotees of the "nationalist movement". Moreover, there was an active attempt by the government to dominate the University from the very beginning. The original buildings, restored or rebuilt from 1940 until 1945, were all personally reinaugurated, with solemn mass and elaborate ritual, by "El Caudillo" himself; enormous plaques of marble (still visible today) were placed at the entrance of each of these buildings declaring that the institution had been rebuilt under Minister X under the generous and courageous leadership of Generalísimo Francisco Franco on such and such date of such and such year.

Although these buildings were rebuilt in their original, architecturally innovative style, Franco broke completely with the campus plans with the new buildings, and imposed his vision of an "Imperial" Madrid harkening back to the traditionally Catholic age of Philip II and the styles exemplified by the palatial monastery of El Escorial. Although a lack of funds fortunately prevented the entire campus from taking on the turreted look imposed by his regime upon other parts of Madrid (a clear example being the castle-like Ejército del Aire building), this particular architectural style defined a few of the new buildings, including the José Antonio Dormitory, named after the founder of the fascist Falangist movement, José Antonio Primo de Rivera (since converted into one of the University's secretarial buildings and subsequently renamed). The campus also took on a more somber look immediately after the war, on account of Franco ordering that all the trees replanted on the campus of the cypress genus, trees traditionally planted in cemeteries in Spain, as a symbol of the "fallen martyrs of the national movement" (this situation was changed later during Franco's regime, and continued over the last half-century, and the campus now actually features some of the most diverse flora of Madrid).

Despite their dedicated efforts, however, period events indicate that Franco was not successful in his attempts to totally control the minds and hearts of the University's students; despite the political oppression of the era, it is evident that even in those early years of the dictatorship and after a brutal Civil War, some of the political students of the University of Madrid were already actively revolting against the government. Its buildings destroyed during the war, the University had been compelled to move back into the pre-Ciudad Universitaria mansions and châteaux; the students took advantage of their lodgings in the city center, and some took the opportunity to hold lightning protests and rallies on the Gran Via and other main thoroughfares whenever possible. Seeking to avoid any potentially embarrassing or undermining displays of civil disobedience and revolt in the face of his newly minted regime, Franco ordered that all efforts be devoted to finishing the University buildings with all due haste, in order to get the students back out into the then-distant Moncloa area and away from the city center as soon as possible. Even though the press of the era was too heavily censored to report on the matter, students from that time recall, with some glee, that the landmark accomplishment of Franco's University rebuilding efforts, the construction of the School of Law and the School of Philosophy in a mere 5 months, due not to the zeal on the part of the builders, but rather to the concern of the unshakeable dictatorship.

During the Franco Regime, the Complutense University was at the forefront of the clandestine opposition movements; the politically active university students came to be ranked, along with the labour and nationalist movements, as one of the chief threats to the stability of the dictatorship. Consequently, members of the Secret Police were infiltrated into the classes in order to monitor the students, and the Falange Party was given the task of patrolling the grounds. The 1960s, in particular, saw some of the most polemic moments in the University's history. From 1963 until the late 1970s, members of both the local and government police were kept perpetually stationed on campus; police officers on horseback were frequently ordered to charge the spontaneous anti-Franco protests that would form along the main university thoroughfares, and several times entire departments were shut down in response to confrontations between the authorities and the student body. In October 1971, the School of Medicine was shut down entirely throughout an entire year due to conflicts with the police, and on numerous occasions the police was actually reported to have staged charges within the actual buildings, although there was an unspoken rule of sanctuary, generally respected, by which the police refrained from actually entering classrooms to arrest suspected protesters.

During the later years of the Francoist regime, the new Somosaguas campus was specifically planned to accommodate the Schools of History and Political Science, respectively, in order to move the most politicized sectors of the University to the relatively isolated town in the outskirts of Madrid. To this day the Somosaguas Campus lies almost completely disconnected from the rest of the University, as well as the Metro lines – in terms of public transportation, it is accessible only by way of a twenty minute bus ride (and by the new light metro line, only since June 2007).

On campus, one of the lasting symbols of this era is graffiti from the early 1950s that still dominates a portion of the School of Philosophy's rotunda: painted in chemicals used for photo developments (which also happen to be permanent and shine when exposed to sunlight), the message calls for freedom of expression in the University and freedom from the Falange Party, which at the time exercised its jurisdiction over the campus. Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz & Manuel Lamana, the students who painted the message, would later be caught and sentenced to twenty years hard labour building the Valle de los Caídos, from which they would later stage a spectacular escape, as fictionalized in the 1998 film Los años bárbaros.

The Complutense University would also be the site of intense, and often bloody, marches and protests during the politically charged years of the post-Franco Transition period.

In 1970 the University returned to its original name. When, later, the people of Alcalá de Henares decided to open a university within the old campus buildings in that city, they were obliged to name it Universidad de Alcalá de Henares to clearly separate it from the Complutense University.