Franco
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For example, the entry for caudillo in the 1911 edition of Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Hispano-Americana, defines the word as a Hispano-American neologism with a mostly (but not exclusively) military meaning: ‘one who as head guides and sends people to war’ (also he who ‘is the head and director of any guild, community or body’). In fact, the work was repeating verbatim the definition provided by the Diccionario de Autoridades de la Real Academia de la Lengua, which still had this entry virtually unchanged in all respects in its 1984 edition.
According to some testimonies, the word caudillo was already in circulation in the sixteenth century and spread particularly in colonial America to denote leaders, heads and commanders of the conquering troops who penetrated those lands and extended the frontiers of the Spanish Empire. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the word started to spread massively, during the wars of emancipation from the Spanish crown and the subsequent civil wars that engulfed the independent countries. In this context of uncertainty and widespread violence, the succession of fragmented military conflicts, both internal and external, there emerged in almost all the new American nations the formation of bands and groups of armed men who were trying to impose some kind of order and equilibrium under the direction of a ‘popular leader’ who held (or lost) leadership through the force of his personality in terms of bravery, charisma, the ability to command and military success. As explained almost a century ago by the Venezuelan historian Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, the leader who thus emerged was not a bandit, an outlaw or a common criminal (except to his enemies, who thus wanted to criminalize his cause and person). He was, on the contrary, ‘the necessary policeman’ in times of anarchy and chaos, when the destruction of traditional social balances made for an armed force led by a strong and feared personality, a requirement for the restoration of minimum order, at local and regional levels, and even at state level:
It is clear that in almost all these nations of Hispano-America, sentenced by complex causes to a turbulent life, the caudillo has been the only force of social preservation, fulfilling the phenomenon that men of science have noted in the early stages of the integration of societies: leaders are not chosen but imposed. The election and the succession, even in the irregular way in which it begins, constitute a further process. It is the typical character of a state at war that the preservation of society against incessant attack calls for compulsory subordination to a leader. Those unaware who read the history of Venezuela found that even after independence was assured, social preservation could in no way be entrusted to the law but to the most prestigious and feared caudillos, those who had imposed order in the military camps and fields.24
This describes how the first half of the nineteenth century in the emancipated Latin America (and also after) was the ‘era of the caudillos’ and the time of the caudillajes, a time of more or less authoritarian governments under the personal guidance of great figures or heroes who had military successes of some kind in the defence of their country, its cause or that of its countrymen, clients and followers. In the more recent words of two other Venezuelan historians:
It is understood that caudillo means a warlord, both personal and political, who employs an armed group that accepts him as leader, a fundamental cornerstone to power. Caudillismo is the dominant political activity deployed by the caudillos in a particular historical moment. It is a form of de facto and pragmatic domination.25
These armed leaders became caudillos with little regard to their social origins (humble, mesocratic or powerful), their previous occupations (military, farmers, ranchers, merchants, lawyers), their degree of cultural achievement (illiterate, illustrious, graduates) or their declared ideology (liberal, conservative, Catholic, anti-clerical). Subsequent caudillos dominated the political life of Latin American nations with varying degrees of success, longevity, social support and institutional endowment: from José Tomás Rodríguez Bobes at the forefront of the monarchists and José Antonio Páez at the front of the patriots in Venezuela, to Ramón Castilla in Perú, Juan José Flores in Ecuador, Antonio López de Santa Anna in México, Rafael Carrera in Guatemala, José Gervasio Artigas in Uruguay, José María Obando in Colombia and Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina.26
In short, the concept of ‘caudillo’ broadcast in independent America probably returned to Spain in the nineteenth century to denote military leaders who, as espadones (swords) in the ‘era of the pronunciamentos’ (coups), ran the factions of the liberal monarchical regime that were harshly consolidated against Carlism or Republicanism: Baldomero Espartero as caudillo and espadón of the ‘party’ of the progressives and Ramón María Narváez as the equivalent for the moderates. The raison d’être of this role for the generals as military strongmen in the political life of Spanish liberalism lies in the very strength of the army as a key institution of a weak state apparatus, engaged in a succession of endless conflicts and subjected to increasing and serious social and political challenges. In the words of the Republican leader Emilio Castelar during the six years of democracy (1868–74): ‘We are so weak that we cannot live without the generals.’27 The consistent use of the word ‘caudillo’ to signify those capable of moving troops in support of one or another programme or party was logical and natural. The term could also apply to prominent figures in political life without any military command: Antonio Cánovas del Castillo called the financier and politician Juan Álvarez Mendizábal ‘caudillo of the mob’, while Alejandro Lerroux, in his radical period in Barcelona, was well known and acclaimed as ‘caudillo of the masses’ of the Republican and working class.28
In the decades before the Civil War, the term ‘caudillo’ returned to public prominence largely as a result of military operations to defend Spanish sovereignty in Africa and to implement peace in the Protectorate of Morocco (1908–27), a task that led to financial and demographic haemorrhages and growing socio-political conflicts in the metropolis. The right-wing Spanish press began to use the terms ‘glorious caudillos’, ‘heroic caudillos’, ‘caudillos of Africa’ or ‘undefeated caudillos’ for the military commanders and officers that led the troops of the Army of Africa (as in the cases of the generals Berenguer, Sanjurjo and Fernández Silvestre, and Colonel José Millán Astray, the founder of the Legion in 1920).29 For example, in January 1923, the popular Madrid weekly Nuevo Mundo devoted an illustrated story (signed by journalist Juan Ferragut) to then Major Francisco Franco, who had played an important role after the disaster of Annual which had put at risk the city of Melilla in the summer of 1921.30 In it, talking about the Africanista military leaders, Ferragut did not hesitate to include among ‘the best, the caudillos, those who when the panic of the shameful defeat spread were strong, heroes and Spaniards’, with General Sanjurjo and Colonel Millán Astray expressly cited. Before the end of that year, on 31 October, another Madrid weekly, Mundo Gráfico, reported on Franco’s marriage in Oviedo with a full page and a portentous headline: ‘The Wedding of a Heroic Caudillo’.
The professional military journals were also regularly using the term with the same meaning, as evidenced by an article published in the Ceuta Revista de Tropas Coloniales in June 1924 under the title ‘El Caudillo de Xexauen’, a homage to General Dámaso Berenguer, ‘The sweetheart of the Army of Africa’. In its issue of March 1925, the same magazine, already edited by Franco as colonel, included an article on its new editor by the conservative politician Antonio Goicoechea which did not hesitate to praise him as the Africanista military leader with this complimentary phrase: ‘For his youth, for his history, for his triumphant career, the new Colonel Franco is a child of the military environment of the Legion and a unique prototype of it. […] The bold soldier has become a caudillo.’
Exactly one year later, in March 1926, on his promotion to general, Franco was again included among the ‘names of the most significant caudillos’ (understood as ‘illustrious warlords’ and alluding to the conquerors of the sixteenth century) in a tribute paid to him by his fellow officers on his move to the I
nfantry Academy of Toledo. The citation delivered on that occasion included a dedication which, like the previous text from Goicoechea, is strangely premonitory:
When the step of the world of the current generation is not more than a brief comment in the book of history, the memory of the sublime epic written by the Spanish army at this stage of the development of the life of the nation will endure. And the names of the most significant caudillos will be covered in glory, and above all of them will rise triumphant that of General Don Francisco Franco Baamonde [sic.] for achieving the heights reached by other illustrious men of war, such as Leiva, Mondragón, Valdivia and Hernán Cortés, and to him his comrades dedicate this tribute with admiration and affection for his patriotism, intelligence and bravery.31
The use of the term in the singular and upper case seems to have begun during the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–30) and as part of the process of ‘charismatic construction’ of his public figure as an authoritarian but effective ruler, to compensate for a lack of constitutional or traditional legitimacy. This process required the mobilization of diverse resources (print and radio media, civil and military patriotic ceremonies) and innovative formulas (the creation of an Office of Information, press campaigns orchestrated at national level, the financing of activities, related media and journalists). In the wake of that operation, he was presented as the ‘Iron Surgeon’ who came to cure the ills of the fatherland (in the best line of the regenerationist Joaquín Costa) or as the ‘National Caudillo’ (a kind of translation of the term ‘Duce’ applied in Italy to Mussolini, whose propaganda apparatus was admired and imitated). It should be emphasized that the experience then acquired would be present in the early stages of shaping the political propaganda of the Franco regime, a favourable circumstance because many of those responsible for this work under Primo de Rivera would assume the same role under Franco: José María Pemán, José Pemartín, Julián Cortés Cavanillas and Máximo Cuervo.32 In any case, it is significant in the history of the word that, at the time of the removal of the dictator by King Alfonso XIII in early 1930, the bulletin from the Comité Ejecutivo (Executive Committee) de la Unión Patriótica (the attempt at a party founded years earlier to gain civilian support for the dictatorship), carried on its cover, in large capitals, the headline: ‘On 28 January our Caudillo Ceased his Government’.
Perhaps, given the use of the term in a political and personal sense under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, the word had little prestige and less usage during the five years of the Second Republic between 1931 and 1936. As studies of the political lexicon of the period tell us, its use was almost always associated with ‘contexts of negative connotation’, in tune with the ‘special democratic sensitivity and anti-militarism of the age’ (the terms ‘caudillo’ and ‘mesnada’ – his group of armed followers – did not appear in the socialist vocabulary). That negative content was still clearer in the derivative ‘caudillismo’ (‘Our struggle against caudillismo will be relentless’).33
However, in the right-wing sectors most hostile to the democratic Republican regime, the term was not rejected at all. José Calvo Sotelo, a former minister of the dictatorship and leader of authoritarian monarchism in open opposition to the Republic, always advocated military action against it and appealed regularly to the ‘caudillos’ who would be speaking in the ‘charged atmosphere of Spain’, just one month before the military attempt of August 1932 led by General Sanjurjo. Little more than one year later, he would reiterate: ‘Nations need great leaders. They need caudillos and when they remove them – great naivety! – they sink beneath an anonymous and infamous leadership (caudillaje).’34 For his part, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator, convert to fascism and leader of the Falange Española, in mid-1933 appealed to a caudillo who was ‘a prophet’ with ‘a dose of faith, health, enthusiasm and anger that is not compatible with refinement’. In the ranks of the political Catholic opposition, in tune with its legalist strategy, the more civilian term jefe became popular (in preference to more traditional terms for leader, director and nobleman) to refer to its political ‘caudillos’.35 Thus José María Gil-Robles, the undisputed leader of Spanish political Catholicism, was hailed as ‘Jefe’, with a capital letter and with common threefold mantra in all gatherings of the CEDA: ‘Jefe, Jefe, Jefe!’ (a slogan that, in part, recalled the triple divine invocation of the religious cult: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord, God of the Universe’).
In the critical context of the eve of the Civil War, there is a remarkable and revealing case of the use of the term in the Socialist ranks that deserves mention. In his speech in Cuenca on 1 May 1936, Indalecio Prieto warned his colleagues of the risk of a military intervention against the Popular Front government and did not hesitate to name the ideal candidate to act as ‘the caudillo of a military subversion’:
I will not say a single word to the detriment of this illustrious military figure. I’ve known him well, when he was commander. I’ve seen him fight in Africa; and for me, General Franco […] becomes the supreme figure of bravery, is a calm man in a fight. I have to own this truth. However, we cannot deny […] that within the military, in considerable size and numbers, there are ferments of subversion, wishes of rising against the Republican regime, not so much because of what the Popular Front represents in its present reality, but because, predominant in the politics of the nation, it represents hope for the near future. General Franco, for his youth, his skills, his network of friends in the army, is the man that in time, can shortly lead (acaudillar) with the best chances – all of which arise from his personal prestige – a movement of this type.36
The Civil War and the Return of the Military Caudillos to the Public Sphere
The military rebellion by the Army of Africa that began on 17 July 1936 was not the prelude to the success of the simultaneous uprising in the rest of Spain, as had been anticipated by the generals, whose operational model was the well-known military coup by Primo de Rivera of September 1923. At this time the insurrection was not undertaken unanimously by all the military, and in just three days (17, 18 and 19 July), it became clear that the rebels were opposed by a significant portion of their comrades in arms, quickly reinforced by rapidly formed armed party and trade union militias. By virtue of this division of military forces and civilian resistance, the military coup sponsored by a large but not overwhelming faction of the army was only partially victorious in half of Spain, thus opening the way for a civil war of unspecified duration and an outcome, in principle, even more uncertain.37
In the areas where the military coup achieved its objectives, power was in the hands of the chain of command of the rebel army, in accordance with the mandatory declaration of a state of war and the previous eradication of hostile or undecided elements in their ranks. The consequent relentless militarization was followed by social and political reaction which repealed the democratic reforms adopted by the Republican governments in order to destroy working-class party organizations and trade unions, whether reformist or revolutionary. To avoid the dispersal of command generated by setbacks and the unexpected death in a plane crash in Lisbon of General Sanjurjo (supreme chief of the uprising tacitly accepted by all), General Emilio Mola constituted in Burgos on 24 July 1936 the Junta de Defensa Nacional ‘that assumes all the powers of the state and legitimately represents the country before foreign powers’ (according to its establishing decree).38 Chaired by General Miguel Cabanellas in his position as the most senior officer in rank, the Burgos junta was composed of the top brass of the rebel generals: Mola, Saliquet, Ponte, Dávila, Franco, Queipo de Llano, Orgaz, Gil Yuste and Admiral Moreno, with colonels Montaner and Moreno Calderón (as secretaries). However, the military operations were under the control of the three generals who directed the troops operating at the fronts: Mola, who commanded all the centre and northern troops; Queipo de Llano, who held the area around Seville; and Franco, who led the troops from Africa, whose transfer to the peninsula would enable him to undertake the
march on Madrid.
The context of civil war from 20 July 1936, with its fragmented geography of local micro strongholds and small active forces facing each other (according to Cardona, at the beginning, ‘both sides fought with quite primitive columns’), was the ideal platform for the insurgent side to revive the word ‘caudillo’ in its usual sense of a courageous and heroic ‘military leader and warrior’. And perhaps the same reason explains its radical exclusion from the vocabulary of its Republican enemies, whether democratic reformists or social revolutionaries. This reactivation was supported by the fact that many of the insurgent leaders had been trained in the Army of Africa and knew and appreciated the term; in addition, its Africanist lexicography (as part of their ideological worldview) would soon become the main and dominant element of the public and official rhetoric of the incipient insurgent institutional apparatus.39 Furthermore, that term and its context were also known, appreciated and used by many journalists and right-wing politicians who cooperated from the outset with the military rebels in the difficult task of constructing an alternative state to the hated Republican democracy.