Living through the transition to democracy: eroding fear, uncertainty, joy for the future

Following the death of Francisco Franco, Spain was left with a power vacuum and an uncertain road forward. 

The dictator appointed Juan Carlos as his successor and future head of state, but in the role of King of Spain. What form or shape this new governmental entity would take was completely up in the air, leading to an atmosphere of excitement and tension across the country. 

There was a spate of political violence, fears of another military coup, and plenty of mass demonstrations taking to the streets demanding new rights and freedoms. 

In the end, Juan Carlos opted to shift the country away from authoritarianism and towards democracy, but it still required a couple of different appointed Prime Ministers and some years to get all legal mechanisms in place, and sufficient consensus to dissolve the Francoist institutions that held power. 

This ebullient period of history has become known as ‘la transció’, or ‘the transition to democracy’ in English, or simply, ‘the transition.’ 

Pilar Aymerich is a photographer from Barcelona who documented this exciting time as she lived through it. “I believed it was history happening live,” she tells Catalan News ahead of the opening of a new exhibition featuring some of her work during the transition in the Fujifilm House of Photography in Barcelona.

Her photographs capture social movements, including protests calling for equal rights, gatherings to express Catalan identity that the regime had suppressed for so long, and other portraits of Barcelona residents at a time when anything was possible. 

She explains that she felt an air of optimism arrive after the death of Franco, as people “were excited to recover some rights that they did not have.” She says the shift towards democracy was “irreversible,” but at the same time, there was plenty of “uncertainty.” The youth of the day lived through it with “joy” as minds were cast towards “a future world.” 

As a photographer, Aymerich looked for details and stories in the people she saw on the street. She says that, at the time of the transition, “Barcelona started to love itself” again. “They started cleaning the facades of the Eixample, which were all black, the love for the city, which in more tragic moments completely disappeared.” 

She also noticed details of the dictatorship and transition to democracy even in how people dressed. Aymerich lived in London for some years during the 1960s and was one of the first people in Barcelona to wear a miniskirt. 

However, she explains having to buy fringes to make the skirt longer due to the looks and comments she received on the street, as people could see her legs. “Then in the transition, silly small things changed, like you could take off your fringes and show your legs. This was a joy and a new way of living,” she says.

After learning of the death of Franco, the first thing Aymerich did, which she says she believes the whole country did, was go buy a bottle of cava and take to the streets.  “But the first day, people were scared too, because they didn't know what would happen next, we didn't know what the future would be,” she explains. “A lot of things were being said, that there could be a military coup again... There was hope that it would be better, but also uncertainty.”

While the dictatorship was characterized by fear, the transition to democracy saw that fear erode. Demonstrations were massive as people were no longer afraid to go out onto the street. “I knew that the police could come, they could beat you, they could take you to jail, but there wasn’t the same fear like there was before,” she says. “There was an air of freedom that I think swept everyone up.”

The transition to democracy was hugely important for women and feminism as well, a movement Aymerich kept up with closely. 

“The first thing it meant was a change of laws, that was the main thing,” the photographer says.. She points to the right to divorce and to choose to have an abortion as huge signifiers of the changing times. 

Aymerich also tells the story of when she returned from France, still during the dictatorship, she wanted to open a bank account for the photography business she had, but she initially wasn’t able to. “They told me that I had to go there either with my husband or with my father, because I couldn't open a checking account on my own.”