Despite the fact that the Francoist jurists had perceived the problem very early (and the succession law of 1947 was an attempt to square the doctrinal circle), in the 1960s it became increasingly more acute as Franco got older.106 By then, the divergence of the jurists’ criteria would reproduce the divergence of opinion among the political and social leaders of the Franco regime. The continuistas (later called inmovilistas) gambled on keeping the essence of the regime without Franco through the institutions of the regime and with a monarch established but limited in his powers by those institutions: ‘After Franco, the institutions,’ according to the political formula coined in 1966 by Jesús Fueyo Álvarez, a young professor of political law and director of the Institute of Political Studies. That was the option that Franco himself, encouraged by his alter ego, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, had contemplated from the outset: ‘The succession of the National Movement is the National Movement, without mystifications.’107
The aperturistas (later reformistas) felt that there would be no possibility of Francoism without Franco and the successor to the title of king (chosen in 1969) should lead the transition to another liberal-democratic formula by will or by force. Such was the open alternative of Fraga Iribarne before the death of the Caudillo: ‘democratic legitimacy is to be recognized in the election by universal suffrage of a representative Chamber.’ It would also be a more veiled initiative by Fernández-Miranda, former tutor of the King and one of the great architects of a transitional process ‘without the formal breakdown of legality’, but with a resolute end: ‘the monarchy of 18 July is meaningless. The monarchy cannot be blue, nor Falangist, nor even Francoist. […] The monarchy has to be democratic.’108
In any case, alternatives to the succession problem, painful in the years 1973–5 with Franco an octogenarian and progressively less capable of regularly fulfilling his duties, would not alter the foundations of political legitimacy of his personal and unique caudillaje: ‘While the protagonist of an era in the history of Spain lived, it was impossible to consider substantial changes.’109 For this reason, in the eyes of international observers disinclined to support the doctrines of the charismatic caudillaje, the political judgement on Franco was much clearer and more negative. In 1959, shortly after Fraga Iribarne’s explanation of the exceptional nature of the Francoist powers and almost at the same time as the rationalization of Fernández-Miranda over their legitimacy of conquest, the French ambassador to Spain summed up the political role of the Caudillo for his superiors in Paris with a laconic formula closer to the reality of the phenomenon: Franco was the closest thing to ‘an absolute and solitary monarch’.110 Also in that year, from his exile, Salvador de Madariaga, a liberal and tempered observer, restated it in a more exhaustive and denunciatory way: Franco was an autocratic dictator on a par with ‘a military and clerical reactionary’.111 It was a way to point out the persistent ‘original sin’ of Francoism as a personal dictatorship that no legal doctrine could hide or disguise, despite all their verbal rhetorical artifices:
The Francoist historiography (one could also say the legal doctrine) did not want ever to consider what the major problem of the Franco regime was: that it always lacked true moral legitimacy before the liberal and democratic consciousness of the contemporary world, given its origin (military revolt, civil war) and its authoritarian and repressive nature.112
3
THE REGIME
A Complex Dictatorship
It was not a civil war between Spaniards, although many times it has been designated that, even though our blood and that of our brothers has run in that fight: no. It was a fight between Spain and Anti-Spain. That of good against evil. We had to mutilate the body, prune the rotten and worm-eaten branches of the old Spanish trunk, eradicate the cancer that corroded us; to leave in Spain what was Spanish, what was ours, not what had come from beyond our borders to be the physical and moral ruin of the nation. […] Therefore our movement could not be an empty movement that confined itself to the military and patriotic. We had to fill it with content, justify its raison d’être, it had to be for the perpetual good of the Spanish fatherland […] Therefore it was necessary that we pruned our tree, including mutilating our body.
Speech by Franco in Madrid, 18 July 1953
What is Franquismo?
‘Franquismo’ (Francoism) is a recent word in Spanish contemporary history that denotes a type of political regime or system of institutional domination which governed the society, economy and culture of Spain for almost 40 years of the twentieth century, beginning in 1936 and ending in 1975.
It is not so easy to characterize the system represented by the Franco regime within the typology of political regimes in contemporary European and world history (or even only amongst those of the twentieth century). This is because the work of collation and comparison necessary to determine the place of Francoism among these systems needs to address patterns of identity, similarity and difference, depending on the criteria applied and the frames of reference used. In this respect, the parameters of collation and comparison are varied and not always consistent. There are several categorizations: (1) the classical Aristotelian trilogy of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (and its degenerations: tyranny, oligarchy and demagoguery); (2) the triad of monarchy, republic and regency; (3) the categories of despotism, absolutism and liberalism; (4) variants of dictatorship (praetorian, military, civil-military), autocracy (traditional, elective, charismatic) and democracy (representative, parliamentary, presidential); (5) the binomial of Caesarism and Bonapartism; (6) the alternative of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, etc.
In any case, be it one or another of those systems (or a combination of several), what is not in any doubt is that the noun ‘Franquismo’ has an indubitable primary significance: it refers to a political regime with all the connotations that, from Aristotle onwards, have fashioned the public sphere of politics as a social activity organized to exercise power and shape authority within a human collective. It takes into account, of course, that power is the strength or ability of some individuals to influence others so that they will act according to the will of the former, and that authority is the legalized, legitimate and effective power of rulers which relies on voluntary, enthusiastic or resigned obedience (‘to lead is not to force’, in the famous phrase of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset).
Thus, Franquismo is a particular form of organization of state power to attend to the political functions that define an organized and civilized human community. That is, a community where power is no longer only coercive brute force but has become the authority to impose duties and demand obedience to exercise a wide range of responsibilities: the legislative functions concerning the formulation of rules and regulations of communal life; the executive functions that involve decisions and actions exercised by public authorities and rulers; and the judicial functions insofar as they affect the administration of justice which maintains the eutaxia (balancing order amid the inevitable conflicts) of the state.
‘Franquismo’ also implies a second historical and political feature that significantly distinguishes it. The term has been coined to denote a system linked to a given historical figure, a unique character: General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who was born in El Ferrol on 4 December 1892 and died in Madrid on 20 November 1975. That is, the eponymous regime is defined by the person who exerted the maximum political power and supreme public authority in an almost absolute way during his long time in office. Of course, this does not mean that Franquismo was only the work of Franco since the system was not built, directed and maintained by a single man, even if his powers were theoretically unlimited. It means, simply, that Franco was the bulwark at the centre of public authority and the exercise of political power, without any superiors to query, limit or review his decisions and mandates.
This personification of the political regime in a singular individual is a key and crucial element in the conceptualization of Franquismo for obvious reasons. So much so that one of th
e great historians of the Franco regime, Javier Tusell, expressed this factor in one of the first works dedicated to examining the matter historiographically: ‘Any attempt to arrive at a full description of Francoism and its fundamental characteristics would fail if it intended to circumvent the role played by the personality of Franco in the dictatorship which ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.’1
Almost all historians and social analysts (jurists, political scientists, sociologists, economists) who studied Francoism share this judgement of the indissoluble marriage between the man and the regime that gives rise to the term ‘Franquismo’. By way of illustration, the explanation in one of the first books dedicated to examining the history of the era, published shortly after the death of Franco by two prestigious historians, the British Hispanist Raymond Carr and his Spanish pupil Juan Pablo Fusi, should be recalled: ‘Franco has been for nearly 40 years Caudillo of Spain, thus embodying the one-man government of the longest duration in the modern history of Europe.’2 Taking the same explanatory line is one of the last major works dedicated to the global study of Francoism, the work of the historian Borja de Riquer i Permanyer:
If this work is titled La dictadura de Franco [The Francoist Dictatorship] it is because I wanted to emphasize the markedly personal nature of the political regime established in Spain by the victors of the war. It was a historical stage in which the dictator was always the key and fundamental part of political life. Without him, this dictatorial regime would have been unthinkable. Francisco Franco did not, in fact, have an immediate political substitute nor one in the medium term. He was a decisive, fundamental and irreplaceable character of the political system. In few epochs of history – none in the contemporary period – has the fate of Spaniards depended on a regime as personal and arbitrary as that of the dictatorship of General Franco. […] Therefore the Spanish dictatorship will commonly receive the nickname of ‘franquista’, a denomination that does not apply in the same way to its counterpart totalitarian systems, which will be more known by the name of the single party – Fascist or National Socialist – than by the surname of the dictator.3
The declaration of principles by Carr and Fusi underlines, in addition, a third decisive feature for the conceptualization of the Franco regime that should be emphasized and stressed: its extremely long duration. In other words, the model of socio-political domination that is called Franquismo had an exceptional longevity in Spanish contemporary history (and also in European history of the twentieth century). That the regime, its evolution and development, existed for almost 40 years (from 1936 to 1975) stands out in comparison with other similar movements.
Regarding the historical evolution of Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Francoist era constitutes the longest, after the liberal-oligarchic regime of the Bourbon Restoration (1874–1923). The comparison is not entirely apposite because the restored monarchy, during its almost 50 years of existence, recorded the reign of two kings (Alfonso XII and Alfonso XIII) and a long regency (that of Queen María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena), while the Franco regime had only one head of state during its four decades: General Franco himself, who took office aged only 43 in 1936 until his death at the age of almost 83 in 1975. In addition, this extraordinary tenure took place in an international context of rapid historical change and enormous and crucial transformations of all kinds: the global crisis of the 1930s, which in Spain ended in civil war; the six years of World War II between 1939 and 1945; a stage of postwar reconstruction and the Cold War during the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s; a phase of economic expansion and international détente in the 1960s; and a period of recession and economic crisis during the first half of the 1970s.
The lengthy existence of the Francoist regime, along with its obvious correlative evolution, mean it is essential that any study aiming for rigorous historical understanding pays particular attention to this aspect. As Javier Tusell, in the aforementioned work, emphasized aptly: ‘In a large part, the peculiarity of the Franco regime lies in its duration.’4 Something very similar was highlighted by the American Hispanist Stanley G. Payne, author of an earlier study on Franquismo published in 1987; it is considered one of the best historical introductions to the era:
The definition and classification of the regime became, obviously, increasingly complex as it extended in time. This is due in part to the same phenomenon of persistence, as it coexisted with the fascist and post-fascist social democratic eras, but even to a greater extent to the successive metamorphoses of the politics and priorities of the regime. Nietzsche once said that ‘that with history cannot be defined’, and certainly the Franco system had a longer history and suffered more historical changes than the majority of non-Marxist dictatorships.5
A similar premise has more recently been pointed out by another scholar of fascist and authoritarian phenomena in twentieth-century Europe. In the words of Robert O. Paxton, attention is drawn to the diachrony by the clear evolution of the Franco dictatorship over its 40 years of existence:
In conclusion, a single isolated photograph from the Franco regime cannot be taken to determine what degree of importance and power the Falange (and fascism) had. The role of the movement changed over time and its power was different in several institutions. […] At the end, in the last decade preceding the death of Franco, the regime was no longer the one that had gone a long way on the path of fascism. It had come close to Juan Linz’s model of ‘authoritarianism’, although it had not lost all its fascist traits. The change had been both gradual and incomplete.6
The Debate on the Nature of Franquismo
The features of Franquismo (its status as a political regime linked to the figure of Franco and to exceptional longevity) constitute the three key assumptions for approaching what is conventionally named ‘the debate on the nature of Franquismo’. That debate is a discussion (not only academic) of the appropriate conceptual definition for understanding and comprehending the type of political regime and model of social domination seen in Spain from 1936 and in force until 1975. It is an intense and long-lasting, perhaps even insoluble and unending, controversy that has involved many protagonists – policy analysts, jurists, economists, sociologists and historians. In essence, such a debate aims to define the characteristics of the Francoist political system by framing it comparatively in the different types of political systems existing in Europe and the world during the twentieth century.7
This definition in comparative perspective, far from being a trivial or contrived practice, constitutes a basic intellectual exercise to understand the historical causes of the origin, structure and evolution of the Spanish regime and thus clarify its links, similarities and differences with contemporary or modern political systems. It should be remembered that the first act of human knowledge is to give a distinct name to things to identify, collate and distinguish one from another in the intersubjective communication process. Accordingly, the first requirement of scientific-social knowledge is the logic of the rigorous and unambiguous conceptual definition of the analysed phenomenon to avoid misunderstandings, ambiguities, contradictions or the simply absurd: exercising the art of distinction against the vice of confusion. In the understanding of historical phenomena such as Franquismo, the comparative lens is compulsory, as pointed out by Max Weber in 1914 in response to the objections of a historian reluctant to apply comparative methods in research:
I see it thus: that which is specific to the medieval city – something that History ought to reveal (on this we are in total agreement!) – can only be discerned by establishing what is missing in other cities (ancient, Chinese, Islamic), and so it is with everything. After that, it is the task of History to causally explain to us this specificity.8
The discussion on the definition of Franquismo as a particular case of political regime began during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. From the first moment, there were two large nuclei of alternative interpretation which, to a large extent, still survive today as the logical ends of a broader spectru
m. Generalizing greatly, one could say that both interpretative schools basically agreed to conceive the July 1936 military insurrection, along with its civilian support in society, as a reactionary, counter-revolutionary and counter-reformist movement whose main purpose was to defend the class interests and traditionally dominant institutions from the realities of the socio-political reforms of the Republican government and the revolutionary threat of an organized, mobilized and very demanding working class. Apart from this basic agreement on the social functions of the insurgent side, the crucial difference between the two interpretations was the consideration of the political nature of that anti-reformist and counter-revolutionary reaction led by the insurgent army and headed by General Franco. In essence, the questions are:
1 Was it an extreme case of a traditionally conservative military dictatorship, such as those that existed then in other parts of Europe following the end of the Great War of 1914–18 and during the interwar period (like that of Marshal Pilsudski in Poland or Admiral Horthy in Hungary) and as Spain had already known in the same period (with the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1930, for example)?
2 Or did it rather represent a Spanish version of the new fascist and totalitarian European regimes in that interwar era arising from the mobilization of sectors of civil society against democratic reform, social revolution and traditional reaction, as had first taken life and shape in the Italy of Benito Mussolini from 1922 and then with greater radicalism in Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1933?
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