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All newspapers should publish, at least, one photograph of the Caudillo in the foreground […]. Newspapers will devote very special attention within the important events celebrated today to the speech delivered by the Caudillo that will be published in full on the front page. The composition should be full-page in bold and with a space of more than a column.88
The Charismatic Cult of the Spanish Caudillo and its Legal-Political Formulation
The resulting personality cult of Franco as mythologized caudillo of Spain thus became one of the central elements of the propaganda apparatus of the regime and its socio-political foundation. Clear proof of the attention given to this task from the beginning were the official instructions given in May 1937 to the newsreel films. At the end of their transmissions there should be an official portrait of Franco accompanied by the national anthem. A year later, instructions in this regard were exhaustive and revealing of the willingness to mythologize the Caudillo as a nearly divine personage: ‘All news dedicated to the Caudillo or on which he noticeably appears, must be included at the end of the newsreel and always, if possible, with a glorifying finish of apotheosis.’89
Aside from the political propaganda of variable quality and of the workings of the political leadership and official journalists, the development of the legitimizing doctrinal body was under the control of a remarkable group of jurists, most of whom occupied influential chairs of political law and philosophy of law in Spanish universities (conveniently cleansed of enemies) and directed and monopolized the new Institute of Political Studies, established in 1939 to serve those same aims and purposes.90
One of the first authors in this task was the young and prolific traditionalist jurist Francisco Elías de Tejada Spínola (1917–78), who soon became a professor at Salamanca and then at Seville and Madrid. Not long after the victory in 1939, the brochure La figura del Caudillo stated that the Caudillo was ‘essentially a military leader triumphant’, a new ‘Alexander’ who ‘has no Achilles heel’ and was a ‘source of sovereignty’ because ‘he is predestined by God to govern a political society in the moments in which the normal organization cannot fulfil its mission’. In tune with his affiliation, Tejada Spínola claimed intellectual support from both Catholic political theologists (Jaime Balmes and Donoso Cortés) and modern scholars (Carl Schmitt and the Italian Fascists Cesarini Sforza and Carlo Costamagna).91
Parallel and simultaneous to this, another jurist with Falangist affiliations formed in Bologna, Juan Beneyto Pérez (1907–94), also undertook in 1939 the task of justifying the doctrine, backed by Arrigo Solmi, Mussolini’s justice minister. His famous book entitled El Nuevo Estado Español underlined the military origins of the Caudillo as a requisite ‘of the principle of single command’, and that he became ‘leader in the war’ and ‘leader in the peace’ because he was ‘the supreme and total leader’ with a main function: ‘Governing is not only to execute, but to be in charge, to legislate most precisely.’ The book ended by recalling with approval the words of the secretary general of FET y de las JONS, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, in celebration of the second anniversary of the national uprising in Valladolid on 18 July 1938:
The Caudillo is not a head of government or a vulgar dictator. He is the charismatic chief, the man appointed by the finger of Providence to save his people. A figure that is more than judicial, historical, philosophical, that falls outside the limits of political science to enter the role of hero of Carlyle or Nietzsche’s Superman.92
In 1939, the same year as the victory, a work signed by Beneyto and José María Costa Serrano reiterated the singular providential uniqueness of the power of Franco with these words: ‘The Caudillo is the total conception and an accumulator of historical functions, legislator, judge, supreme executor and party chief. He penetrates all social and political life.’93
In 1941, during the culminating moment of the regime’s identification with the powers of the German–Italian Axis in World War II, another jurist of renown with a chair in Madrid, Luis Jordana de Pozas (1890–1983), published in the journal of the Institute of Political Studies a dense article on ‘The Principle of Unity’ based on a clear-cut premise: ‘If power is unitary, it has to be incarnated in one single man who exercises it in an effective and personal way.’ For this reason the Burgos junta in 1936 had decided to eliminate a ‘division of powers’ and to transfer ‘all the powers of the state’ to Franco, including in its wisdom not only legislative and executive power, but also ‘the judicial function’ (‘even if that power continued to be exercised by judges and courts’). The resulting institution of the caudillaje, in the person of Franco, was part of the process that ‘the states arising from national revolutions’ were experiencing (Italy, Portugal and Germany were expressly mentioned in similar terms). And, in keeping with the National Catholic affiliation of the author, one of the advantages of the Spanish case was precisely the religious quality of the Caudillo, evoked in a quotation from a speech delivered at the second National Council of FET: ‘One single legitimate authority in its origins and in the vocation of its will […] governs, with God’s help, the destiny of Spain towards the realization of its historical enterprise leading the national revolution.’94
Just a year later, in 1942, when the course of the war began to take an adverse turn for the Axis powers, another Spanish Falangist jurist assumed the task of formulating a ‘doctrine of the caudillaje’ to substantiate the legitimacy of Franco’s powers in a way that was to become the canonical doctrinal piece on the subject. Francisco Javier Conde García (1908–74), shaped in Germany under the guidance of Carl Schmitt (whose work he translated into Spanish), would be professor of political law at the University of Santiago de Compostela and later at Madrid until entering the diplomatic service in 1946 and enjoying a long and distinguished career. Conde was going to be, par excellence, ‘the caudillaje theorist’ (according to Alberto Reig Tapia) and ‘one of the most brilliant interpreters of the new state’ (in the words of Ferran Gallego).95
First in the pages of the official journal of the Falange, Arriba, and then in a book with the resonant title Contribución a la doctrina del caudillaje, Conde stressed that the caudillaje was an institution that was supposed to fuse the highest will of unity of command and the faith in a providential man, charismatically legitimized (even though this legitimacy did not exclude Spanish tradition but rather assumed it). He also remarked that military victory, as a barely sublimated right of conquest, was the most legitimate power base for charismatic authority: ‘The form of military command is the most precise and practical way to ensure the organization of power, because it reaches the highest degree of rigour in command and security in obedience.’ In his argument, ‘acaudillar [i.e. to lead] is, above all, to command legitimately’ (not a mere provisional dictatorship, according to the terminology of Schmitt), ‘acaudillar is to command charismatically’ (because the exceptional nature of the Caudillo generates unlimited devotion) and ‘acaudillar is to command personally’ (because in emergencies power has to be undivided to be effective and cannot limit its decisions for any formal reason). In a fair appreciation of the need for integration of other related political cultures (and the uncertainty of the coming times), Conde also added that charismatic legitimacy could assume or become traditional legitimacy thanks to the constitutional process (summoning of the Cortes, the subsequent definition of the state as a ‘kingdom’, etc.): ‘The prevalence of the charismatic element in the caudillaje does not exclude the principle of traditional legitimacy.’96
With less critical but equal political conviction, the same year, at the height of Nazi–Fascist influence on the Spanish regime, a Falangist comrade explained in a simple manual the Caudillo’s nature as saviour and father of Spain through his status as undefeated and victorious warrior, which empowered him to undertake the path of total regeneration of a Spain redeemed by the blood and the sword of its sins against God and history:
When a nation reaches the state of decomposition that ours had re
ached, there can be no salvation if there is not a profound and social change, with a new conception of the state; that is, a national revolution, and this national revolution demands at the forefront a figure, not the ‘leader’ of a democratic party, nor a head of government not even that of a vulgar and well-known dictator, but the figure of a Caudillo, a charismatic leader (a free gift that God grants to this creature), a man appointed by the finger of Providence, who escapes the limits of political science to become the ‘supernatural hero’ or the Superman. […] The caudillaje is reverent before the superior and arises by God’s mandate reflected in historical evolution, therefore the Caudillo is born alone, elected on his own merits and when this moment arrives undisputed and indisputable. He is accepted as caudillo by virtue of his triumphant sword, the clarity of his decisions, the sharpness of his vision to command and show the way forward. Destiny gave Spain this exceptional man in the most painful of all her challenges.97
The year 1942 also witnessed the emergence of the second revised edition of a doctrinal text that defined, from fundamentalist Catholic tenets, the specifics of the Spanish regime in an international context and as a result of ‘the deep crisis of historical democracy’. Its author was Luis del Valle Pascual, professor of political law at Zaragoza, and the title of the work was Democracia y Jerarquía. It was an attempt to explain the origin and structure of the regime from the idea of overcoming the ‘purely formal, inorganic and completely empirical democracy of the forgers of constitutionalism’, regimes corrupted for being ‘democracies, of numerical majorities, levelling and egalitarian, democracies of individuals’. To accomplish that, he formulated and collected concepts and ideas that would have a wide circulation in later years, when the Axis had been defeated and the victory of the Western democracies forced the reformulation of the defining categories of the ‘new Spanish state’. Del Valle Pascual postulated the greater effectiveness of models of ‘organic democracy’, based on the basic social forms (corporations, families, classical municipalities) and formulated by a ‘command hierarchy’ according to ‘a fair principle of selection’. At the front would be a ‘head of state’ who would be ‘the pinnacle of this selection of citizens’, chosen ‘by the will expressed by the people by enthusiastic acclamation or plebiscite’, who was the recipient of ‘their full and entire confidence’ and became ‘supreme leader and director, commander and guide of the people’. Of course, the best model of such a system was that of ‘the current Spain, around the great figure of the Caudillo’, a providential and charismatic leader who guaranteed ‘a more perfect unit of direction and sovereign decision’. A caudillo, moreover, whose history and career ‘will serve the divine plan and will be close to the designs of God’.98
A comprehensive review of that legal-political propaganda generated by the regime during the crucial years of the Civil War and the world war requires at least a mention of the works of other jurists or equally prestigious political scientists: Luis Legaz Lacambra, Luis Sánchez Agesta, José Antonio Maravall, José Pemartín, Ignacio María de Lojendio, Juan Candela-Martínez, etc.99 However, expanding the overview in that way would hardly change the process of creating the charismatic leadership of Franco. Neither would it alter the crucial role played in that process by the triad of institutional pillars holding up his regime of personal authority: the triple status of Generalissimo, providential man and supreme Pater Patriae.
The passage of time and the changes in international context did not substantially modify the official doctrine of charismatic legitimacy of the Spanish regime, even when the defeat of fascism and the brief international ostracism suffered by the dictatorship damaged its legal and political credentials within and outside Spain. It did alter the nature of the regime, though: the transition without trauma from the national-syndicalist state that shaped the Fuero del Trabajo (1938), the Catholic and organic democracy prescribed by the Fuero de los Españoles (1945), to the Catholic, social and representative monarchy of the Ley de Sucesión (1947) and the state of rational administration of works and services which the Ley Orgánica del Estado (1967) postulated.100
The reading of the official legal formulations after 1945 proves the persistence of the caudillaje under the new institutional moulds and conceptual frameworks. In 1951, with Franco’s Spain in the process of slow rehabilitation in the context of the Cold War, a young jurist named Manuel Fraga Iribarne (1922–2012), who was then professor of political law at Valencia (later at Madrid), renewed the traditional charismatic foundation with a dose of technocratic and functionalist validation more in keeping with the times (and consciously stressing its exceptionalism and consequent uniqueness). His book was titled Así se gobierna España and was intended, primarily, for Western international circles within which the regime tried tentatively to reinstate itself, with growing success:
The Spanish people, in full crisis of coexistence, had accepted the supreme leadership of Franco to defeat communism militarily; but, at the same time, it asked him to reconstitute the country politically under the form of the most authentic caudillaje, in the better sense of the word. Seeing the failure of governments to organize the country since the crisis of 1931, it was hoped that this time there would be a single and true caudillo who would give new laws, a new constitution to the community. Like Solon, like Cromwell, like so many other national heroes, General Franco was to be father of the country, and return it to normality and order. […] Currently, the head of state assumes the presidency of the government and occupies a position more like that of a president of a republic than that of a regent. Let’s not forget that the situation is properly one of a power in emergency. That is to say that the command of Franco represents an extraordinary concentration of powers to deal with difficult circumstances; but not a tyrannical power imposed on the nation, which recognized him on all occasions as its caudillo.101
A decade later, in 1961, another professor of the same discipline (at the University of Oviedo) and later an equally important political protagonist, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda (1915–80), wrote a widely used textbook (El hombre y la sociedad) that would be one of the latest doctrinal formulations of the caudillaje adapted to the new times of technocratic development. Fernández-Miranda rescued the magisterium of Weber and its three types of political legitimacy (rational, traditional and charismatic) but connected it with Spanish Catholic traditional thought and its three types of legal authority (by succession, election and acquisition or conquest). In addition, he explained and justified the caudillaje with very explicit historical and functionalist reasons (again, exceptional and unique):
If in a situation of grave danger, a ship is without a captain and anyone who normally replaces him, the person that in the midst of anarchy was able to impose his voice and his command would be automatically, with total legitimacy, the ship’s captain. Similarly, with the exercise of power in situations of social shipwreck and institutional power-vacuum, the person who is capable of prompting the consent of the people and being a director or conductor of the same, is, exceptionally, but with undoubted legitimate title, caudillo. The exposed doctrine is, ultimately, the doctrine of the conquest, as the legitimate source of power, of Saint Thomas Aquinas and of our Spanish theological lawyers of our golden age, Vitoria, Suárez, etc. Indeed, it responds to these concepts […] the caudillaje, established as an exception. The process of permanent civil war, latent or expressed, in Spanish life since Fernando VII, reached its peak in the anarchy of the Second Republic, making civil war inevitable. From that war arose the conductor or caudillo of the crusade, in the person of Francisco Franco, inspired by a National Movement and proclaimed by the adhesion of national Spain.102
Finally, in 1973, in the critical phase of late-Francoism, an influential work by José Zafra Valverde, a member of Opus Dei and professor of political law at the University of Navarra saw the light in Régimen político de España. The book’s author recognized unequivocally the uniqueness of a regime of ‘national leadership’ (caudillaje) that conferre
d on Franco ‘a political office in which sovereignty is concentrated in the strictest way’ and in ‘the double meaning of the maximum capacity and the maximum authority’ and its derivations: ‘functions of authority or persuasive control, constituent, legislative and supreme administration, executive and judicial’. Such a concentration of sovereign authority had its foundation in the ‘legitimacy of origin’ (the victorious defence against the Communist revolution begun by the army in July 1936) combined with a ‘legitimacy of exercise’ (‘Peace, economic progress and social justice are the three concepts that summarize the positive balance of governmental work’). This dual genetic legitimacy, effectively endorsed by what the author called ‘ductoria and soterica’ legitimacies, is key to understanding the sovereign and absolute personal power of Franco:
But then there is the fact of the marked personalization of political sovereignty, which from the beginning has been the fulcrum of the regime. […] As well, in this respect we noted two forms or cases of political legitimacy that have projected their stimulating light on an ongoing will to command and a collective intent to consent. First was what we might well call a ductoria legitimacy (from the Latin ductor: guide or leader); then, and with greater fortune, a legitimacy for which we propose the title of soterica (from the Greek soter: saviour).103
But the doctrinal formulations generated by those circles, with all their variations and modulations, could not hide (nor wanted to) the profoundly anti-liberal and anti-democratic nature of the regime’s caudillo.104 Nor could it avoid the greater problem of any regime of charismatic and exceptional personal power: the problem of the successor to the unique leader. As Georges Burdeau also noted, it is all about regimes in which ‘it is known who commands, but ignored who has the right to command’ because ‘the succession of personalities who embody all power’ cannot be codified charismatically.105 This serious defect of charismatic legitimation led to a process of ‘institutionalization’, which, as already observed by Max Weber, necessarily resulted in its transformation into other forms of legitimacy, either traditional (with the monarchy or similar historical institutions), or rational (resorting to representative election in any of its variations).