The body of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who founded Spain’s fascist party in 1933, is being exhumed. For 63 years, his carcass occupied the place of honor in the Valley of the Fallen, the vast mausoleum built by Francisco Franco as a memorial to the civil war dead. Jose Antonio’s remains lay next to Franco’s, the two rightist leaders surrounded by the remains of soldiers who died on both sides, like twin pharaohs compassed in death by the mingled corpses of their servants and their foes.

Spain’s socialist government understandably objected to these arrangements, prompting Jose Antonio’s family to take his body and inter him with Catholic rites. It feels as if Spain’s post-war compromises and pieties are being buried with him.