Franco

by Enrique Moradiellos

  The first interpretation used the new concept of ‘dictatorship’ that emerged in the contemporary period based on its original Latin meaning: a regime of force and exception created provisionally to overcome a grave crisis or emergency of state. That was the classical meaning of the ‘commissarial dictatorship’, because it was intended to commit a service and end after completing its mission. The new concept of ‘dictatorship’, as stated by the German pro-Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in 1921, was not an exceptional temporary institution but a ‘sovereign’ regime with the intention of permanence (sovereignty, according to Jean Bodin, being the ‘absolute and perpetual power that the Latinos call Majesty’). Its first most finished form was the domination of a group (such as the Committee of Public Health in Revolutionary France in 1793) or an individual (such as Napoleon after his coup of 1799) who assumes plenitudo potestatis (full state power) and pursues it without limitation because dictator est qui dictat (a dictator is one who dictates: ‘dictate’ in Latin being synonymous with ‘order’ or ‘command’).9

  The consideration of Franquismo as a ‘dictatorship’ in the modern sense (which replaced the classic words of ‘tyranny’, ‘despotism’, ‘autocracy’ and ‘absolutism’) had large and prominent backing in Republican and Nationalist ranks and, later, would have substantial support among historians and social scientists. The president of the Republic and a remarkable representative of the reformist bourgeoisie, Manuel Azaña, did not hesitate to note in his diary of October 1937 the scarce modernizing features that, in his view, the Spanish right could entertain even in a war situation:

  There are or might be in Spain all the fascists you want. But there will not be a fascist regime. If force triumphs against the Republic, we would fall back under the power of a traditional ecclesiastical and military dictatorship. No matter how many slogans are translated and how many mottos are used. Swords, cassocks, military parades and homages to the Virgin of Pilar. The country can offer nothing else, as can already be seen. […] I have explained to them thoroughly the origin, the purposes and means of the rebellion and the war; […] the typically Spanish characteristics of the military and ecclesiastical dictatorship that the rebels implanted, whatever slogans are raised and the colour of their shirts.10

  Paradoxically, the same opinion of the non-viability of full fascism in Spain had been put forward three years previously, in 1934, by the journalist Luis Araquistáin, the éminence grise of the radical socialist left and furious critic of Azaña’s style of republicanism:

  In Spain, an Italian or German type of fascism cannot be produced. There is no demobilized army, as in Italy; there are not hundreds of thousands of students without a future, nor millions of unemployed, as in Germany. There is no Mussolini, not even a Hitler; there are no imperialist ambitions, or feelings of revenge, or problems of expansion, not even the Jewish question. From what ingredients could Spanish fascism be made? I can’t imagine the recipe.11

  It is not surprising that, a month after the Civil War began, these judgements by prominent Republican leaders were also shared, with regret, by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder and leader of the then tiny Spanish fascist party, the Falange Española, from his jail in Alicante. Before being executed in November 1936, José Antonio recorded his concerns:

  What will happen if the rebels win? A group of generals with honourable intention but of bleak political mediocrity. Basic elemental values (order, pacification …) Behind: (1) old Carlism, intransigent, closed-minded, unfriendly; (2) conservative class interests, short-term, lazy; (3) agricultural and financial capitalism: the ending in many years of any possibility of constructing a modern Spain. The lack of any long-term national sense.12

  It is revealing that this same opinion was harboured by prominent Nationalist leaders both then and later. For example, General Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, cousin and military secretary of Franco, would write in his diary on 28 October 1955 what was, in his opinion, the essence of the political model of Franquismo:

  There is too much talk about the Movement, unions, etc., but the reality is that the whole shebang is held up only by Franco and the army. […] The rest […] the Movement, unions, the Falange and other political apparatus, have not taken root in the country after 19 years of the uprising; it is sad to record it, but it is the truth.13

  Franco himself, in the privacy of his family, did not mind the use of ‘dictatorship’ to describe his regime. According to the testimony of his only daughter, he was not reluctant to be named a dictator:

  It didn’t bother him at all, because in the end it was a dictatorship and to him, in his lifetime, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera seemed good, it was not so demonized as now, that anyone could say, ‘Uff, a dictatorship!’, ‘Call me a dictator!’, and that didn’t bother him because he felt that was what it was.14

  However, against these judgements that in general tended to discard the possibility of the existence of a fascist regime in Spain for reasons of economic and social backwardness (in comparison to Germany and Italy) and sufficient traditional forces to maintain the desired order (the military and religious bureaucracy), there also circulated during the war a profusion of contrary opinions. For example, Luis Araquistáin, on the eve of the outbreak of the war, noted the presence of a peculiar Spanish fascism, ‘cunning and overlooked’, already defined not by the existence of a fascist leader supported by a mass civil party brazen in their violent conquest of the state, but by the assumption by the conservative right of a political programme focused on the violent repression of the workers’ mobilization and the destruction of representative democratic and parliamentary institutions. In his words, the performance of the Catholic and monarchist right in Spain was:

  To end the social and secular content of the Republic and, eventually, the same Republic, the autonomy of Catalonia and the workers’ organizations of Marxist inspiration. But this is fascism without disguise, adapted to Spanish realities. […] A fascism supported especially by the landed classes, the Catholic Church and the army; more like that of Austria and Portugal than Italy and Germany.15

  This consideration of fascism as a social project for the defence of a violently repressive and anti-liberal bourgeois order, irrespective of its strict political format, would receive full acceptance by almost all the Spanish and European left during the years of the Civil War and afterwards. Largely, this interpretation centred on the social roots and aims of fascism (downgrading its precise political mode), reflected the analysis carried out by European Marxist circles on the birth of the Italian and German dictatorships. In 1933, the Communist International had defined fascism as ‘the open and terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialistic elements of finance capital’. In a similar vein, the respected Austrian Socialist leader Otto Bauer had analysed the roots and social functions of the new movements of the radical right:

  The capitalists and big agricultural landowners do not deliver the power of the state to the fascist hordes to protect themselves against the threat of the proletarian revolution, they deliver it to reduce wages, eliminate social benefits achieved by the working class, destroy unions and end positions of political power by the workers. Their aim, in other words, was not so much to suppress revolutionary socialism as to smash the achievements of reformist socialism.16

  On this basis, once the Civil War started in Spain, for the left the term ‘fascist’ came to define (with obviously demonological and denunciatory shades) the enemy led by Franco as a whole, while the ‘anti-fascist’ epithet would become the common identity of the heterogeneous political spectrum who remained loyal to the Republic. It is significant that on the Francoist side, for the same demonological and generic reasons, the heterogeneous enemies were qualified imprecisely as ‘reds’ and ‘Communists’ without any major differentiations and nuances. The consequent use of the concept of fascism, emphasizing almost exclusively its social dimension and reducing or annulling its political form, is apparent, for example, in
the first manifesto on the Civil War issued by the Communist Party of Spain in August 1936. In it, ‘fascism’ was defined simply as the movement, reactionary and undemocratic, unleashed against the reformist Republic by a coalition of ‘priests, aristocrats, cowardly generals and young upper-class fascists’:

  For many days now the soil of our country trembles under the thunder of cannons and stains of blood shed by the felony of a group of reactionary generals who, villainously betraying promises and repeated oaths of loyalty to the Republican regime, have risen in arms after seizing the means with which the state could defend the integrity of its national territory. Traitors and thieves have allied themselves to the representative forces of the past linked in a degenerate and obscene ‘senoritismo’ [classism], incarnated in the fascist rabble, which in the hands of a gun-toting and criminal clergy, representative of the bloody tradition of the Inquisition, are destroying villages where they pass, committing horrific crimes, only possible to conceive in perverse imaginations or in those lacking any humanity.17

  As the Civil War progressed, Nationalist Spain incorporated formal political elements present in Germany and Italy (a single party, fascist salute, corporate and imperial rhetoric, charismatic exaltation of the Caudillo, etc.). That identification of Franquismo with fascism was not only accentuated but also became more true. At the end of 1937, even the British diplomatic representatives in Spain – early and tacit supporters of the military revolt and privileged and unbiased witnesses to its evolution – warned their superiors in London of the fascist drift. One of them reported that Francoist Spain showed ‘a strong absorption of the methods and ideas of Italian Fascism’. The British ambassador noted with concern this phenomenon:

  What is emerging in the territory of Franco today is a form of national-socialism inspired by both Germany and Italy, although more the latter than the former. I think that the French have every reason to be concerned and we also. […] In short, the Spain that emerges from a Franco victory will not be the Spain of Alfonso XIII nor the Spain of the Republic.18

  Indeed, judging by the actions and public statements of Franco, Nationalist Spain had undergone a conscious and considered political conversion to fascism. From April 1937, the new unified party had assumed the previous Falangist programme almost entirely, affirming its inalienable ‘will of empire’ and the need to build a ‘national syndicalist state’ that would be ‘a totalitarian instrument in service to the integrity of the fatherland’. And, as has already been seen, Franco himself from then and almost until 1945 lent credibility to this evolution with a new fascist rhetoric that affirmed his status as ‘leader responsible before God and history’ and stressed the ‘missionary and totalitarian’ nature of the new state that was under construction ‘as in other countries of totalitarian regime’. This fascist inspiration was behind the attitude of the regime during World War II and explained its more or less open or underground logistical support of the German–Italian cause and furious anti-democratic phobia of the censored Spanish press. At the end of 1942, the Spanish Caudillo eloquently shared the intimate and secret judgement put forward by his chief political adviser and virtual alter ego, the future Admiral Carrero Blanco:

  It is clear that Spain has a decided wish to intervene on the side of the Axis, inasmuch as it fights our natural enemies that are this complex of democracies, Freemasonry, liberalism, plutocracy and communism, weapons with which the Jewish power tries to annihilate Christian civilization, whose defence is our historical mission in the universe, but our effective intervention is conditional on two circumstances: that the Iberian peninsula will become part of the strategic game of the great global contest, and that we have the physical possibility of carrying out an effective action.19

  For this reason, according to those statements and actions, the consideration of Franquismo as the Spanish version of a fascist state was a popular opinion, both in academic circles and with the public in general. Salvador de Madariaga, a noble representative of democratic liberalism, who from the beginning of the war had declared himself incompatible with both sides, argued with particular vehemence at the end of 1944 for the identity of Franquismo with fascism:

  In vain you [Franco] attempt to present Spain abroad as a democracy. There is no worthwhile democracy. There is no trickery that can conceal taupe-coloured shirts, like Hitler, white jackets, like Hitler, dark trousers, like Hitler, the Roman salute, like Hitler, the title of Caudillo, a bad translation of Führer, like Hitler, the single party eating up the country in a full spree of corruption, like Hitler, the press tamed, like Hitler, beating dissidents, like Hitler, the Gestapo, like Hitler, the concentration camps, like Hitler, the shootings, like Hitler. General, go.20

  Perhaps the peak and popular sanction of that identification took place in the immediate postwar world, with the fascist powers defeated, on the occasion of the formal condemnation of the Spanish regime issued by the three great Allied leaders at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945. The ban on the entry of Franco’s Spain into the new United Nations Organization was reiterated with harsh judgements and words:

  The three governments (British, Soviet and American) feel bound, however, to make it clear that they for their part would not favour any application for membership put forward by the present Spanish government, which, having been founded with the support of the Axis Powers, does not, in view of its origin, its nature, its record and its close association with the aggressor states, possess the qualifications necessary to justify such membership.21

  Thus, already during the Civil War and the immediate postwar period, the Franco regime was the subject of passionate discussion by contemporaries, with positions polarized: either to understand it as a simple but traditional bloody military dictatorship or to think of it as the Spanish version of European fascism with all its unique nuances. It must be said that almost the same terms marked the debate between scientific analysts (historians, jurists, political scientists, sociologists and economists), as has been seen.

  Certainly, one should begin by pointing out that the conceptualization of Franquismo as a ‘military dictatorship’ has solid foundations and thus is supported today by a large part of the historiography and current social sciences. For example, Giuliana Di Febo and Santos Juliá, authors of a recent study on the subject, stress that the ‘fundamental peculiarity of Franquismo’ lies in the fact that it was configured as a military uprising during a brutal civil war and these origins ‘marked for a long time the institutions, political orientations and the very conception and management of power’.22

  Indeed, where it triumphed, the anti-Republican revolt of a large faction of the Spanish army in July 1936 established a regime of force to deal with a socio-political emergency (the war) and to replace existing democratic institutions (which were turned into the enemy). In this way, the rebel army (which was a substantial part of that institution), as the bureaucratic corporation responsible for the monopoly of weapons and the legitimate use of violence, tried to assume the leadership of the state at what was understood to be a critical juncture (confronting a weak civilian government that was betraying national interests), following the praetorian and militaristic tradition active in Spain since the time of the War of Independence in 1808. This deep-rooted tradition, which had the army as the backbone of the fatherland responsible for its integrity and security, was considered to be legitimate military intervention in the event of the apparent inability of civil authorities to maintain social order or to preserve the unitary central state institutions. This had been referenced by the constituent Law of the Army of 1878: ‘The first and most important mission of the army is to sustain the independence of the fatherland and defend it from external and internal enemies.’23 Thus, it had proceeded to act in September 1923 under the direction of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, the recent political model known by all the rebels in July 1936.

  The consequent militarization of state and society implied by this praetorian militaristic tradition was patent in the first
decisions of the rebels after a military coup was transformed into civil war. On 24 July 1936, a Junta de Defensa Nacional (National Defence Committee) was formed in Burgos which ‘assumed all the powers of the state’ (according to its constituent decree) and implemented a state of war and the banning of all political and trade union actions. It was a collegiate military agency involving all rebel military chiefs, with strict respect for their rank and seniority (which was why the elderly General Miguel Cabanellas presided). One of its most influential members, General Emilio Mola, would define with precision its functions and powers in a declaration of intent clearly inherited from the praetorian military tradition:

  In this work of national reconstruction […], we, the military, have to lay its foundations; we have to launch it; it is our right, because that is the nation’s wish, because we have a clear idea of our power and only we can consolidate the union of the people with the army, detached until 19 July by the absurd propaganda of stupid intellectualism and political suicide.24

  The configuration of corporate and exclusive military power in insurgent Spain was paralleled by an intense process of social and political involution which revealed the authoritarian, anti-reformist and counter-revolutionary drift of armed reaction on the march. The uncontested domain of hierarchically ordered military authorities was completed by the total subordination of right-wing parties and related organizations, which ended up abiding by the hegemony of the generals without serious discussion, both in the strategic conduct of the war and at a political level in the reconstruction of an alternative state. Franco himself, prior to his election as supreme commander, had already warned the right-wing civil leaders of the dire need to impose a fierce unity in the rearguard under military tutelage if they wanted to win the war: ‘Everyone will have to sacrifice things in the interests of a rigid discipline which should not lend itself to divisions or splinter groups.’ That iron unity was to be preserved by a ‘military dictatorship’ whose model would have to be the ‘military directorate’ of Primo de Rivera’s times, as Franco himself acknowledged to the press.25 The logic generated by the war spread as a hegemonic political culture, a kind of ‘social militarism’ that was presented as a solution for the regeneration of the country. It was defined and defended by the military medical commander Antonio Vallejo-Nágera in 1938: