The conventional view in the literature on the legacies of violence holds that the original experience of violence has a direct political and social effect on the victims and their descendants. In this paper, we problematize this view noting that for reasons of expediency political entrepreneurs sometimes seek to alter the memories of violence through manipulation of historical memory post-conflict. To test whether the manipulation of historical memory alters the legacies of violence we study municipalities located to either side of the Lleida line, a battlefront in Catalonia that had been stable for some time during the Spanish Civil War. The intensity of violence to either side of this line varied for reasons that were plausibly exogenous to the political preferences of local inhabitants. Leveraging the data on actual violence during the civil war and in its aftermath, a detailed dataset that we constructed on historical memorials in this area, and outcome measures of political preferences and behavior from an original survey and electoral records we ask whether (i) the pattern of memorialization faithfully reflects the experience of violence, and (ii) whether present-day attitudes and behavior are more a legacy of the original experience of violence or of the subsequent policy of memorialization. We find that the link between civil war violence and memorialization is not always tight and that contemporary attitudes are often a product of memorialization rather than the original experience of violence. These findings suggest an important corrective in the field of legacy studies.