Through this same versatility of functions and situations, the Caudillo became, before the law, the ‘supreme and unique institution’ of the Franco regime. This was accurately highlighted by Giménez Caballero in one of the most widespread propaganda addresses to ‘the combatants’ during the Civil War, which was also a call for all to close ranks around his person for reasons of mere survival:
We the fighters – this new and traditional army of Spain – we know Franco and worship him fanatically. […] And everyone knows – especially the reds, the enemy – that without FRANCO all our dreams, all our sacrifices, ‘everything’ and ‘all’, would collapse and be lost. […] And before this grandeur and this glory SPAIN! – SPAIN OF FRANCO AND THE FALANGE, FALANGE OF GOD AND THE ARMED FORCES.72
Of course, the unconditional military victory achieved in April 1939 would always be the foundation and original source of legitimacy for Franco to govern as caudillo of Spain. That same military force guaranteeing the irreversibility of that victory remained the ultimate ratio of the existence of the regime. Franco himself made clear both aspects at various times throughout his public life. That was the case in his inaugural speech, delivered on 17 March 1943 before the newly constituted Cortes. He affirmed: ‘With the rights arising from the legitimacy of power of a man that saved a society, we institute a system of enlightened and paternal government.’ Three months later, on 17 July 1943, he reaffirmed this idea in his speech commemorating the start of the war: ‘Our policy is based on the right of our victory, backed by the force of reason, strengthened by the will of the people and faithfully kept by the loyalty of our armies.’73
The subsequent appeal of the Caudillo to his comrades in arms to preserve the fruits of the victory was constant and recurrent throughout the existence of the dictatorship, particularly in its most difficult times. In October 1945, with international condemnation raging, Franco turned to the senior commanders in the Escuela Superior del Ejército with these words:
While those times of true peace, solidarity and improvements that we all crave do not arrive, I exhort you, in the middle of your work, to remain jealous and vigilant in defence of the sacred unity of our fatherland, attained at so high a price, standing firm against any cracks that are attempting to open in our ranks, because it is demanded by the mandate of our dead, the existence of our nation and all those who have worked these nine years for our resurgence.74
A little less than a decade later, in November 1957, in new and critical circumstances, the Caudillo again addressed his army comrades to remind them of the vital role assigned to the military in his regime along the old praetorian tradition of Spanish history. The speech took place in the courtyard of the Alcázar of Toledo, the iconic place that had witnessed one of the most revered wartime events for the Francoist army, a symbol of its bravery and perseverance:
If whatever we do in order to forge unity amongst the peoples and lands of Spain is transcendental, it is equally or more transcendental when we apply it to the army. The army is the backbone of the nation. What unifies, sustains and maintains the rigidity of the whole. Through the bone marrow runs the vital essences of the sacred values of the fatherland. It is not the head that directs and reflects, or the other parts that organically make it up, but the spine that binds and holds it. With this broken, the body would be in tatters.75
Near the end of his life, in September 1975, Franco again returned to the theme before a committee of generals, leaders, officers and non-commissioned officers of the armed forces who came to show their commitment in the face of the difficulties they then confronted:
For me it is always a great satisfaction to find myself with my colleagues of the military family and even more in these times which require greater unity and effective service, not to lower our guard, but to stand firm in our purpose to defend Spain in this tormented world. We are not indifferent to outside problems that require us to maintain our serene and watchful position of constant vigilance.76
Charisma and Political Legitimacy: The Doctrine Underlining the Caudillaje
Of course, the construction of the Caudillo’s regime of personal and sovereign power was not exceptional in twentieth-century history. It was, rather, one of the most definitive cases of the new type of dictatorial regimes that emerged in Europe during the ‘age of dictators’ of the years of both world wars and the period between them (1914–45). These were regimes that, unlike the earlier nineteenth-century dictatorships (either monarchist or military), were constructed through a process of ‘charismatization’ of personal authority and ‘around a cult of the exemplary, missionary leader, destined to re-forge national unity and lead the people into a new era’.77 While the roots of dictatorship should be sought in the idea of a strong and powerful leader that has existed in Western political thought since the times of Alexander the Great and Caesar, its new modulation at the dawn of the twentieth century was indebted to the contributions of Thomas Carlyle (with his romantic praise of the heroic leader), Friedrich Nietszche (with his theory of the dominant superman), Gustave Le Bon (with his premise of a mass era that demanded great leaders) and the school of political scientists that had called into question the purely rational basis of Western liberal political systems (from Roberto Michels to Gaetano Mosca, including Vilfredo Pareto and other ‘heirs of Machiavelli’ of the time).78
The triumph of the democracies in the Great War of 1914–18 did not mitigate this trend of the personalization of supreme authority in a charismatic and single leader. Essentially, the effects of the war on borders, mentalities and societies provided the context for the emergence of a plethora of new dictators, sovereign bearers of ‘creeds of national redemption’ and ‘gospels of purifying violence’ across the continent: from Lenin in Bolshevik Russia in 1917 to Mussolini in Fascist Italy in 1922, also including Marshal Pilsudski in Poland in 1919, the regent Horthy in Hungary in 1920 and Kemal Atatürk in Turkey in 1921.
The phenomenon of such new dictatorships and political movements was so evident that it led Max Weber in 1921 to formulate his concept of ‘charismatic authority’ as one of the three existing types of ‘legitimate justification for political authority’. Weber used the term ‘charisma’ (from the Greek charis, translated into Latin as gratia) in its original sense of a special and outstanding quality of a person who seems to be vested with an original gift, a particular and luminous grace which arouses devotion in others and reverence to their pronouncements and decisions. The use of the term changed from its first religious and sacred beginnings (the magician, the prophet, the apostle) with the new political times to denote the aura of holiness and infallibility of the new autocratic leaders that awakened ‘popular idolatry’ and partly resurrected ‘the ancient cult of the deified ruler’.79
The new type of Weberian charismatic authority was in opposition to and co-determined by the other two basic ideals registered in history: ‘traditional’ authority (which lay in the usual and customary law, either dynastic or theocratic) and ‘rational’ authority (legally defined by rules and institutions above the individual, whether partially representative, plebiscitary or liberal-democratic). According to Weber, this ‘charismatic domination’ was based on the ‘extraordinary rendition to the sanctity, heroism or example of a person and of the order created or revealed by him’. Its contrast with other forms of legitimacy derived from that extreme personalization of the duty of obedience to a unique, outstanding and exceptional command:
In the case of legal domination, obedience lends itself to an impersonal and objective legal system and persons established by that regulation under the formal legality of his commands and within the scope of those people. In the case of traditional domination, obedience lends itself to a competent person by virtue of the tradition and linked to the tradition by virtue of personal loyalty. In the case of charismatic domination, the leader with charismatic qualities is obeyed by virtue of the personal confidence in his heroism, relevance, or exemplary character in which the belief in that charisma was
enshrined.80
Following that fruitful Weberian category, writers of the age and after would underline the novelty of the new charismatic regimes that concentrated all state power in a singular person (the ‘personal power’ of Georges Burdeau) who was a depositary of plenitudo potestatis, for a lifetime, without time restrictions and in an uncontested manner. This was the modern dictator who, as highlighted in 1921 by the jurist Carl Schmitt, was not only the classic dictator (limited to the performance of a mission) and necessarily temporary, but a true sovereign and constituent dictator destined to stay (because he was the source of law and founder of a new regime).81
In short, the new charismatic dictator defined a magistracy of absolute, unique and unrepeatable power precisely by that ‘charisma’ that must be understood as the quality of the ruling sovereign to which the governed are subject de facto and de iure, recognizing his legitimacy, his prestige and his authority according to his uniqueness and significance for the country, nation or group. It was a kind of ‘immense Caesar’ of flesh and bone, bearer of an extraordinary mission to be the saviour of a nation, people or class and the guarantee of its renaissance: the author and recipient of new forms of civil ‘political religion’ or of a religious sanctification of politics.82 That was the novel doctrine of legitimation of the absolute power of Italian Fascism in the person of Mussolini, of National-Socialism in the figure of Hitler and even of Soviet Communism around Stalin, all models well known and disseminated long before the Spanish war created the context for the implementation of the principles in the case of Franco.83
As an illustrative example of that new charismatic legitimacy as a source of sovereign authority, one should remember the degree of the mythologized personal cult of the Duce in Italy, which spawned Fascism as a central part of its civil and secular ‘political religion’ (according to Emilio Gentile). In March 1934 the organ of the Fascist Youth proclaimed the mythical and supernatural virtues of the ‘new God of Italy’ with these rhetorical clichés common until almost the end of the regime:
His figure stands out, already monolithic, now, in history, in projections for the future, dominating men and things, as a prince of the state, as a genius of the race, as redeemer of Italy, as a Roman, in reality and in myth, of imperial Rome, as the personification and synthesis of the popular ideal, as the great initiated […]. He followed from the beginning the practice of the hero [who] sets off alone to conquer the world, who exists before and only in his creation of the spirit […] Mussolini has been the shining light, he is the inspiring and creative genius: he is the animator who drags and conquers; it is he: the solid entirety of myth and reality.84
In the subsequent case of National Socialism, it is appropriate to recall the features and contexts which, according to the canonical analysis of Franz Neumann (in 1942), were essential characteristics of that ‘Germanic religion’ that responded to a concept of political leadership defined under the formula of the Führer Prinzip:
Adolf Hitler is the supreme leader. He combines the functions of supreme legislator, supreme administrator and supreme judge. He is the leader of the party, army and people. In his person the power of the state, the people and the movement are unified. […] That person is the lifelong Führer. […] He is independent of the other institutions. […] Right is what the Führer wants and legislation emanates from his power. Similarly, the Führer embodies the administrative power, which is exercised in his name. He is the supreme chief of the armed forces and supreme and final judge. His power is legally and constitutionally unlimited. […] The supreme leadership is not an institution governed by rules and precedents nor a position of delegated authority, but the investiture of power in one person, Adolf Hitler. The justification of this principle is charismatic: it is based on the claim that the Führer is endowed with qualities that ordinary mortals do not have. From him emanates superhuman qualities that penetrate into the state, party and people. […] In periods of civil war, religious disturbance and deep social and economic upheavals that produce misery and pain, men are sometimes unable – or are deliberately unable – to perceive the laws of the process that has led them to this situation. The less rational strata of society are looking for leaders. Like primitive men, they look for a saviour who removes their misery and frees them from poverty. There is always a factor of calculation, frequently on both sides. The leader uses and enhances the sense of reverent fear; henchmen flock round him to achieve their aims.
Obedience is a necessary element of charismatic leadership, both subjective obedience – as an onerous burden – as well as objective – as a means of forcing the fulfilment of duty.85
The doctrines of legitimation of the power of Franco in Spain used these theories of charismatic power abundantly and profusely to justify the Spanish caudillaje of a ‘divine Caesar of a fulminant victory’ (in the words of the hyperbolic Giménez Caballero). But, as has been pointed out, unlike the cases mentioned above, the creation of a new type of charismatic authority around the figure of a military leader who had waged and won a civil war combined several unique components: (1) military support that always underpinned Franco’s role of Generalissimo with ‘all the powers of the state’ by express delegation of his comrades in arms; (2) religious support that converted him into a ‘crusader of the faith of Christ’ and a ‘providential man’ anointed by God to govern the nation; and (3) political support that placed him as national leader of the only official party of the regime, ‘only responsible before God and history’.
The result of the merging in a personal ‘single command’ of those diverse yet complementary powers of legitimation (military, religious and political) was the attribution to Franco of the title of caudillo of Spain, by the joint willingness of the army, by the grace of God administered by the Catholic hierarchy and by the leadership of the single-party state which consolidated and organized his civilian supporters. A good example of this symbiosis in propaganda terms can be seen on the cover of the newspaper Abc (the ‘largest in circulation of National Spain’) on the second anniversary of the ‘glorious uprising of the army’, on 18 July 1938. The text (which could be the archetype of the tributes of the Francoist press at that time) was a declaration of faith of combined National Catholicism, national militarism and national syndicalism whose apex and keystone was the charismatic figure of the Caudillo:
We believe in God. We believe in Spain. We believe in Franco. We trust in God. We trust in Spain. We trust in Franco. We love God. We love Spain. We love Franco. […]
Our rapport with the ideal of a united and traditional fatherland, faithful to the spirit of the glorious dead of the crusade, its martyrs and heroes, today has a strict, unambiguous, sign that is designated to us by the hand of God and for the destiny of Spain. This sign is Franco. With Franco, with the national Movement, that he not only leads, but of which he is the architect, inspiration and creator, with whatever Franco thinks, feels and wants, we solemnly reiterate our identification with this day of 18 July, in order to commemorate the date in which the faith and patriotic love of the providential man redeemed Spain.86
Of course, the passage of time would not change the tone of the celebration, despite the changes in context. The newspaper Extremadura (Cáceres) demonstrated this on 18 July 1946, featuring a portrait of Franco with the caption ‘CAUDILLO AND LORD’, reiterating his exceptional qualities: ‘Franco, captain of the victory, national caudillo of the Falange, supreme commander of the armies, head of state, a synthesis of the highest Spanish virtue saved in July 1936’. And 20 years later, as part of the festivities of 1 October 1966, the same newspaper renewed its vows of loyalty to the ‘Caudillo of Spain’ in appreciation of the 30 years of peace and prosperity achieved under his mandate, ‘asking God to continue to bless him in the highest task, preserving for many years his precious life for the good of the fatherland, which is protected by his trusted hand’. Just two years earlier, on the occasion of a visit by the papal legate to the basilica of the Valle de los Caídos, the nerve
centre of the cult of the Caudillo in the Franco regime, Admiral Carrero Blanco had revived that charismatic authority of Franco with a resonant speech widely reported by the Spanish press:
The divine goodness, moved no doubt, by the sacrifice of so many martyrs [in the Civil War], gave us an exemplary caudillo who not only led us to victory on 1 April 1939, but also knew how to cut sharply at the origin of the evil to fix it at its root, settling the political future of the fatherland on the redemptive formula to join the social with the national under the rule of the spiritual. To him we the Spaniards owe our freedom, our inner peace and that our children and our grandchildren are educated in the Catholic faith. The free world is indebted to him for not permitting a communist state in the Iberian Peninsula, where, as has happened in Central Europe, the Church would be silenced. The same day that our war was ended, the Caudillo promulgated a decree ordering the erection of a monument to perpetuate the memory of the fallen, to honour those who gave their lives for God and country, and to serve as an example to future generations.87
Obviously, the careful presentation of Franco in the Spanish press was a response to the iron-fisted government control of the media that had already been imposed during the Civil War, and the subsequent promotion of him, both personally and politically, was carefully monitored by the bodies responsible for official propaganda. For example, one should remember the tenor of the binding instructions to all the newspapers sent in November 1941 and December 1942 by the Delegación Nacional de Prensa (National Delegation of the Press), the branch of the Home Ministry in charge of censorship and media control:
Franco Page 17