In short, with the last shot in the Pacific, the diplomatic war between the Anglo-Saxon powers and Russia has begun. England and the United States are united against Russian imperialism […]. In this obvious case of cold self-interest, the Anglo-Saxons (despite what they say on the radio, in the media and even the politicians, great and small) not only do not support, but oppose everything that could create a situation of Soviet hegemony in the Iberian Peninsula. They are interested in order and anti-communism but would prefer to achieve this with a different regime to the current one. […] The pressures of the Anglo-Saxons for a change in Spanish politics that breaks the normal development of the current regime will be much lower, the more palpable is our order, our unity and our impassivity to threats and impertinences. There can be no other formula for us than: order, unity and endurance.112
Franco responded to the monarchist challenge by emphasizing the process of defascistization of the regime, already developing into a ‘Catholic and organic democracy’ which dignified humanity and was more perfect than ‘the formal and garrulous democracy that exploits it’.113 The purpose of this declared campaign of ‘constitutional cosmetics’ and ‘apparent change of façade’ was to improve the public image of the regime and minimally meet the democratic sensibilities of the victorious Allies. It was, according to the private testimony of Franco before his ministers, a ‘cleansing of the imitation’ of the Axis without ‘yoking us to the democratic cart’. And all this without substantial changes: ‘To cede would be taken for weakness.’114
The conversion of the national syndicalist regime into a National Catholic regime was formalized with the enactment by Franco, on 13 July 1945, of the third of the ‘fundamental laws’ of Francoism (after the Fuero del Trabajo in 1938 and the Ley de Cortes adopted in 1942) – the so-called Fuero de los Españoles, a substitute for a real charter of civil rights and democratic freedoms. Just a week later, Franco formed a new government; most notable (aside from the inclusion of six military men who continued in key portfolios) was the promotion of a leading Catholic politician as minister of foreign affairs: Alberto Martín Artajo, president of Acción Católica, who had accepted the position on the advice of the cardinal primate, Pla y Deniel, to collaborate in ‘the evolution of the regime towards a Catholic and monarchist formula’. In any case, the new Cabinet was a demonstration of the juggling skills of the Caudillo to form balanced, useful and submissive governments. The final act of this conversion to organic and Catholic democracy was the adoption, on 22 October 1945, of the Ley de Referéndum, intended to open to Spaniards a consultation mechanism on proposed bills that the Caudillo believed suitable for plebiscite.
Measures taken by Franco in 1945 and afterwards gradually reduced the pressure from the monarchists and military in favour of Don Juan de Borbón. Before them all, the Caudillo made clear his determination to remain in power without surrendering the state headship to the pretender, although he would be prepared to offer apparent concessions. Introducing the new Fuero de los Españoles at the Falange National Council, on 17 July 1945, he pointed out: ‘It is not a question of replacing or changing the commander unless it is in the national interest, but defining the regime and ensuring its succession faced with the hazards of mortality.’115 He was even more clear and explicit in his statements to General Kindelán: ‘As long as I live, I shall never be a queen mother’; ‘I will not make the same mistake as Primo de Rivera. I do not resign; from here to the cemetery.’116 To the most influential of the monarchist officers, General José Enrique Varela, then high commissioner in Morocco, Franco coldly warned at the end of 1945 of the risks of breaking the unity of the victors of the Civil War: ‘If they succeed in toppling the goalkeeper, we would all fall; if they find us united they will not dare to attack to the bitter end.’117 Very soon the British ambassador in Madrid clearly appreciated that Franco’s die-hard resistance strategy was achieving its objectives:
All those who fought on Franco’s side in the Civil War are once more giving rein to their fears of renewed strife and are inclined to cling to Franco rather than risk a change while French Communists are still dominant in Paris. […] Franco is playing upon the general dread of a renewal of the civil war and even those former adherents who are sick of him, notably Army leaders, prefer his régime which at least maintains order to the risk of chaotic conditions or worse if French and Moscow are allowed to have their way. Franco feels moreover in a strong position as long as his opponents both Monarchist and Republican are still divided and poorly led and he argues that there is no alternative between him and the Communists.118
Indeed, faced with the dilemma of either enduring him indefinitely or trying to overthrow him by force and risking a war with the hypothetical return of the Republic, the monarchists mostly resigned themselves to Franco’s pompous reign without a crown. In fact, Franco began to make unlimited use of all the royal prerogatives, including the right to approve new bishops, the entry into cathedrals under a canopy and the granting of titles of nobility (which he exercised on 39 occasions throughout his life). A few years later, he dared to confess to his status as de facto regent with constituent powers: ‘We are indeed a monarchy without royalty, but we are a monarchy.’119
To a large extent, the failure of the anti-Franco opposition, whether it be monarchical or Republican, lay in its limited active social backing (with a hungry population fearful of a new war) and the patent lack of encouragement and firm support it received from abroad. Franco knew that he had only one real enemy: ‘Only the Allied armies could throw him from power and they do not seem very inclined to do so.’120 In fact, from the beginning of 1945, both the United States and Britain had launched a policy of ‘cold reserve’ and occasional ‘pinpricks’ against the Spanish regime to force the voluntary withdrawal of Franco on behalf of Don Juan, with the support of the military high command and without risking a recommencement of civil war. The geo-strategic interest of the Iberian Peninsula for the defence of Western Europe, accentuated by the first signs of dissension between the Soviet Union and its former allies against Nazism, reinforced the will to preserve the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of third countries and to prevent any danger of political destabilization in Spain. Both Washington and London agreed with that analysis for shared and powerful reasons: ‘If we are too stiff with Franco we may give undue encouragement to Communist elements. In the present mood of Moscow they might well turn out to be as inimical to our long-term interests as the Falange itself.’121 Therefore, rejecting Soviet demands to apply effective sanctions (diplomatic, economic or military), the victors of World War II were limited to imposing a toothless international ostracism within whose ambiguous framework – the disintegration of the great Western–Soviet alliance and its replacement by a climate of cold war – was forged the survival of the Franco dictatorship in the postwar world.
In these circumstances, just like the monarchists, the victorious democratic powers ended up resigned and yielding to the Caudillo: the alternative to supporting a harmless Franco was provoking political destabilization in Spain with an uncertain outcome. The new British Labour government, like the US Democratic administration, resolved to endure his presence as a tolerable lesser evil preferable to a new civil war or a communist regime on the Iberian Peninsula, despite the profound personal and political displeasure it caused in official and governmental circles. In August 1945, after a tense audience with the Caudillo, the new British ambassador in Madrid confidentially described him to his superiors with the following words: ‘He is certainly a smiling villain – rather absurdly unlike the popular idea of a dictator with his Pekingese goggle eyes and fat tummy and short legs.’ In London, the diplomatic analysts for the Foreign Office added to that description a few very revealing notes: ‘And I fear he is a shameless liar. The captured German documents in our possession prove that’, ‘He has a skin like a rhinoceros.’ However, despite these reservations and antipathies, almost a year later, another senior official from the same
ministry privately summed up the reasons that precluded all effective Allied pressure, economic or military, to achieve the fall or retirement of Franco:
The fact remains that Franco is not a threat to anybody outside Spain, odious though his régime is. But a civil war in Spain would bring trouble to all the Western Democracies, which is what the Soviet Government and their satellites want.122
This rather weak diplomatic cold shouldering had begun in March 1946 with a tripartite British–French–American declaration (without the USSR) expressing those nations’ repudiation of the Franco regime and their wish to see democracy restored in Spain. At the end of the year, the UN General Assembly recommended the withdrawal of ambassadors from Spain to force the democratic transition (a measure not taken by the embassies of the Vatican, Portugal, Ireland or Argentina). Franco’s imperturbable resistance to these measures revealed the bankruptcy of Western policy to oust him peacefully and without violence. In his speech before the Cortes in May 1946 he warned the Allied powers of the danger of undermining the stability of a regime that had only one enemy (‘Communism, which has been working for universal Bolshevism for more than 25 years’) and a legitimacy of origin (‘Our victory saved a society on the point of dying’). It was, he claimed, a regime that was not a mere ‘dictatorship’ but a ‘Catholic state’ and ‘organic democracy’ tailored to the ‘individual character of the Spaniards’ and their tendency ‘to selfishness and anarchy’, as had been shown during the Republic (a product of ‘all changes, revolutions anarchy from all previous periods’). It was a regime that had not entered the world war (‘He did not allow himself to be carried away by the temptations for his own benefit’), nor had it seconded the policies of the Axis despite the gratitude that was due for their assistance in the Civil War, nor could he be considered alien to the Western world:
Others try to present ourselves to the world as Nazi-fascists and anti-democratic. Once, we did not mind that confusion given the prestige enjoyed by this kind of regime in the world; today when the cruelty and ignominy of the vanquished has been revealed, it is fair to highlight the very different characteristics of our state. […] The perfect state for us is the Catholic state. […] Spain has set an example of how to practise the Catholic doctrine. With it, Spain has survived the biggest crisis in its history and achieved, without the least outside help, its reconstruction.123
Following the same policy of essential resistance and formal flexibility, in March 1947 Franco passed the Ley de Sucesión a la Jefatura del Estado (Law of Succession to the Head of State), which defined Spain as ‘a Catholic, social and representative state in accordance with that tradition, declaring itself to be a kingdom’. It bestowed sovereignty and a lifetime regency upon the figure of the ‘Caudillo of Spain and of the Crusade’, which conferred on him the right to designate a successor ‘to the title of king or regent’ at any time and revocably.124 Franco submitted the Ley de Sucesión to a referendum in July 1947, just when the international outlook began to clear (four months before, President Truman had made public his doctrine of containment of Communism in Greece, Turkey and the rest of the ‘free world’). The result of the poll, which had been orchestrated by the regime from start to end, could not have been more satisfying for Franco. The law was adopted by such an overwhelming majority (93 per cent of the voters, with an 82 per cent turn-out) as to be suspicious: of the 17,178,812 adults with the right to vote, 15,219,565 went to the polls, 14,145,163 voted in favour, 722,656 voted against and 336,592 votes were invalid or void.125
In any case, the passage of the law substantially reduced any room for monarchical manoeuvres and accentuated the divide between the collaborationist majority and the minority opposition. The intensity of the blow sustained by the monarchist cause was very well appreciated by a disillusioned General Kindelán in a private letter to Don Juan:
Franco is these days, as I say, in a state of total euphoria. He is a man in the enviable position of believing everything that pleases him and forgetting or denying that which is disagreeable. He is also puffed up with pride, intoxicated by adulation and drunk on applause. He is dizzy from the heights; he is sick with power, determined to hold on to it, sacrificing whatever is necessary and defending it with tooth and claw. Many see him as perverse and evil; I do not. He is crafty and shrewd, but I think that his work has convinced him that his destiny and that of Spain are intrinsically linked and that God has put him in this position for some grand design. Dizzy from his unwarranted elevation and lacking any cultural awareness, he does not appreciate the risks of an excessive extension of his dictatorship that every day is more difficult to end. […] In summary: I do not think Franco, in his current egotistical state, will restore the monarchy, when at his feet are 12 million submissive slaves.126
The triumph of this last-ditch strategy by the Caudillo was evident at the beginning of 1948, when the French government ordered the reopening of the Spanish border which had closed two years earlier. Shortly thereafter, in August, Don Juan met with Franco on a yacht in the Bay of Biscay and yielded to Franco’s demand that his son and heir, Prince Juan Carlos, was educated in Spain under Franco’s tutelage. The Caudillo already had very serious doubts about the qualities of Don Juan to succeed him and had begun to outline the idea of cultivating as a potential and fortunately distant successor the prince (then only ten years old), in which the Francoist doctrine of the monarchist ‘appointment’ and the principle of the dynastic ‘restoration’ could be reconciled.127
From the end of 1948, with Prince Juan Carlos in Spain and at the height of the Cold War abroad, Franco already knew that no essential danger would call into question his ‘command’ or his diplomatic recognition in the West. The young Prince would remember later (when king) that his predecessor as head of state was a ‘cold and mysterious man’ who ‘did not speak much and hated to explain himself’, whose main political lesson consisted of ‘look, listen and keep quiet’.128 One of the maxims that Franco most liked to repeat was,‘One is a slave to what one says but the owner of one’s silence.’129 His messianic belief that he was providential for Spain had also deepened, as noted by the writer José María Pemán, a supporter of Don Juan but still a collaborator with the regime: ‘It is no joke; it is a sincere conviction, created by 100 limitations of military training and 200 adulatory mirages.’130 The proof of the complacency exhibited by Franco at the time was the marriage of his only daughter to the son of the count of Argillo, the doctor and Madrid playboy Cristóbal Martínez Bordiú (Marquis of Villaverde). The splendid wedding ceremony, with more than 800 guests and officiated by the archbishop of Toledo and cardinal primate of the Spanish Church was held in El Pardo on 10 April 1950 and was worthy of a king’s daughter. The sermon delivered by Cardinal Pla y Deniel reached the pinnacles of National Catholicism when, while talking to the bride and groom, he compared the Franco family to the Holy family: ‘You have an exemplary model in the family of Nazareth and another more recently in the Christian home of the head of state.’131
‘Nenuca’s’ wedding would change the life and family of Franco considerably. Firstly, the couple would give him, between 1951 and 1964, seven grandchildren who he would shower with affection and attention both in private and in public. Secondly, the numerous Villaverde clan displaced in El Pardo the families of Franco’s brothers and exerted a remarkable aristocratic influence on Carmen Polo (especially evident in her fondness for antiques and jewellery). In any case, although he never criticized his son-in-law, Franco ‘finished by ignoring him altogether’. His cousin and aide considered the son-in-law ‘lightweight in the extreme’, while his personal confessor showed on several occasions his concern ‘for his frivolous conduct and lack of consideration to his in-laws’.132
The marriage of his daughter took place during the final stage of the international rehabilitation of the Franco regime, which would be formally completed in June 1950 when Soviet–US tension triggered a real ‘hot’ war in Korea. The conflict would eliminate all reservations amongs
t Western leaders because it underlined a pressing need: ‘Spain as a people and Spain as a geographic entity should be a part of the Western community.’ And that meant negotiating with a Caudillo who was not particularly wanted but essential. In the words of the American chargé d’affaires in Spain in June 1950:
Franco is a Gallegan. This is in a sense a synonym for stubbornness. He certainly holds the whip hand in Spain today. He thinks he knows better than anyone else what is best for Spain and the Spaniards today. He listens to what he wants to hear, shuts his mind and ear to all other. […] Franco is the kind of Spaniard who likes to get into the movie without buying a ticket. He has certainly given no evidence of willingness to pay any price for admission to the West. […] As a result, Franco leans back with complacency and anticipates the world will come to him on his terms. Franco’s vision stops at the borders of Spain.133
Under the impact of the Korean War, in November 1950 the General Assembly of the United Nations decided to revoke by a large majority (with strong US support and French and British abstention) the 1946 condemnatory resolution towards Spain. This opened the way in successive months for Western ambassadors to return to Madrid and the approval of the entry of Spain into specialized international agencies (the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, etc.). The eventual entry of Spain to the UN would have to wait until the General Assembly of December 1955.
Even so, the rehabilitation of the Franco regime in the West was partial, limited and entailed a tremendous economic and political cost for Spain itself. The survival of the Franco dictatorship, still associated with the Axis in Western public opinion, excluded Spanish participation in the crucial US economic aid for European reconstruction (the Marshall Plan, launched in June 1947). It also barred Spain from the Western joint defence talks started in March 1948 that would give rise to the North Atlantic Treaty and the creation of NATO in April 1949.
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