Franco

by Enrique Moradiellos

  Militarism means order, discipline, personal sacrifice, precision in service. Enclosed in the military vial are essences of social virtues, as well as physical and spiritual strength. We advocate social militarization, the prevalence of militarism in society, militarism which did not, exclusively, involve standardizing all of the citizens. […] Militarization of the school, university, office, workshop, theatre, salon, café, all the social fields, so that the scholar, the student, the white-collar worker, the blue-collar worker, the artist, the debater, will be perpetual soldiers of the empire.26

  However, it is now clear that the Franco regime was never a simple collegiate and praetorian military dictatorship, even though it had its origins in the army and even if the army was always, even at the end, the key and crucial pillar of that institutional political system. On the contrary, the unexpected extension of the Civil War and the turbulent international framework that served as a critical context to its course and development were the main reasons for the rapid transition from the phase of domination by a collegiate military junta to a full military dictatorship of personal and individual power. In fact, after the conversion of the coup into a long war, it became imperative to concentrate command in one person to make the war effort more effective and to ensure that external support was obtained (the military, financial and diplomatic support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). Recognizing this situation, the Burgos junta named, at the end of September 1936, General Franco the ‘Generalissimo of the army, sea and air forces’ and ‘head of the government of the Spanish state’, and formally transferred to him ‘all the powers of the new state’ (realized by the decree of 29 September 1936).

  In other words, the collegiate military dictatorship became a military dictatorship of personal authority whose sole, exclusive and absolute holder was Franco, the most prestigious of the insurgent military commanders and the one who had reaped major successes on the battlefield (the unstoppable advance of his African troops on Madrid) and on the diplomatic front (making direct contact to win the support of Hitler and Mussolini). From then on, the political regime would begin to be properly reconfigured and named ‘Franquismo’, in honour of the crucial and decisive importance of its head in the formation and subsequent evolution of the regime.

  A key factor needs to be taken into account in this regard. Franco was not satisfied with staying as a mere primus inter pares in relation to the comrades in arms who had elected him to the post. From the very beginning, he demonstrated a willingness to exceed his position as temporary commissarial dictator, appointed by his peers, to try to become a sovereign dictator who made use of this plenitude of powers for an unlimited time and without higher authority. On 1 October 1936, while the self-styled ‘head of state’ maintained the leadership of government that had been transferred to him by the junta, a Junta Técnica del Estado (State Technical Board) was created to advise and manage the civilian administrative tasks. Thus began the conversion of Franco into the absolute ruler and personification of sovereign authority and military power that had governed the destinies of insurgent Spain without constraint.

  However, Franco did not limit his political activities to stressing his status as individual and personal representative of the power wielded by the army as a state bureaucratic corporation. He immediately demonstrated his intention to overcome this category of mere military dictator, albeit permanent and sovereign, to assume other sources of legitimacy and sustain his power for his own benefit and further underpin his emergent regime of personal, absolute and unchallengeable authority. Also on 1 October 1936, Franco announced his intention to organize Spain ‘within a broad totalitarian concept of unity and continuity’. Indeed, from that point, he would demonstrate his willingness to emulate his German and Italian champions through the promotion of a process of political and institutional fascistization that would transform him into ‘caudillo’ (his official title of highest authority, equivalent to duce or führer) of Spain, alien to the centuries of decline and on a mission to recover its strength to undertake a new ‘march towards empire’.

  Likewise, Franco’s efforts to restore to the Catholic Church all its rights and privileges lost during the Second Republic earned him the gratitude of the episcopate, which contributed to his individual political rise and provided a religious sanction of huge national and international propaganda value. The conversion of the Nationalist war effort into a ‘crusade for God and for Spain’ since the start of the war was thus completed with the subsequent conversion of Franco into homo missus a Deo, an emissary of Divine Providence and soldier of God, to lead the defence of the Catholic nation threatened by communist atheism.

  Within the conscious fascistization of his regime, Franco was able to undertake one of perhaps the most crucial tasks in defining his regime: the forced unification into a single party of all the political forces that supported the war against the reformism of the Republic and the spectre of social revolution unleashed in the Republican rearguard. These forces were the new fascist radical right represented by the Falange Española, the old reactionary right embodied by Carlist traditionalism and the hitherto majority conservative right articulated mostly by political Catholicism and, to a lesser extent, by authoritarian monarchism. On 19 April 1937, in a decree issued from his headquarters, the Caudillo proceeded to dissolve all those parties and to integrate them, ‘under my leadership, into a single political entity of national character’: the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. Thus, was created a ‘state party’ (with the old Falangist component predominant) that, after the army and the Church, would constitute the third supporting pillar of the institutional framework already perfectly characterized as ‘Franquismo’. As the writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero would point out in 1938, the need to win the war not only ruled out any opposition to Franco but sealed with a pact of blood (spilled at the front and in the repression of the rearguard) loyalty to the Caudillo of the victory: ‘the Francoist Party will be that of the combatants in this war.’27

  Thus, in April 1937, the gradual transformation of Franco into supreme commander of the armies, head of government, head of state, crusader of the faith of Christ and national chief of the single party had converted Franquismo into something more than a mere military dictatorship of sovereign personal power. The Francoist political-institutional system was no longer just a military junta with a leading and prominent head; it far exceeded the previous model of military directorate of General Primo de Rivera. This was made clear by Article 17 of the new Law of Central Government approved by Franco on 30 January 1938, at the same time as he formed his first regular government with ministers ‘subordinated to the presidency’, appointed and removed freely by the Caudillo by use of his absolute powers:

  The head of state, who assumed all powers under the decree of the Junta of National Defence on 29 September 1936, has the supreme authority to enact legal rules of a general nature. Provisions and resolutions of the head of state, previous deliberation of government, and on the proposal of the minister of the sector, will take the form of laws when they affect the organizational structure of the state or constitute the main rules of the legal system of the country, and decrees in the remaining cases.28

  This transformation was the origin of a new political situation that generated the need to identify and conceptualize the resulting system using new categories. Almost all of the researchers who have dealt with the matter (historians such as those already mentioned and others such as Antonio Elorza or Julio Aróstegui; jurists like Juan Ferrando Badía or Manuel Ramírez; sociologists such as Amando de Miguel and Salvador Giner) have pointed out the relevance of understanding that conversion using concepts such as ‘Caesarism with a military base’, ‘Bonapartist dictatorial regime’, ‘authoritarian caudillista regime’ or ‘caudillista dictatorship’, amongst others.

  In general, these descriptive categories suggest that the new Spanish Caudillo at the heart of the regime fulfilled the same role of arbitration and charismatic dicta
tor as Napoleon Bonaparte or his nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, in the nineteenth-century First and Second French empires, respectively. According to the interpretative thesis of the Bonapartist model, Franco had become, like them, the central element of the political system and held his comprehensive authority by virtue of being the balancing figure and final arbiter between all the components and supporting factions. The ultimate nature of his undisputed power and decision-making as supreme judicial arbitrator was a response to the lowest common denominator of all interests and forces that supported the political regime that he presided over during the war and lent him their support and backing, with greater or less enthusiasm, in order to achieve victory and preserve it.

  To those Bonapartist features, the typology of the caudillo model (or Caesarist – meaning a soldier who becomes a caudillo) added the role of charismatic leader whose full powers were based on his supposed exceptional skills as a soldier and as a victorious ruler against the enemy, engendering the loyalty of those under his command through his prestige and the exaltation of his person as a singular authority. The charismatic leadership, as the principle of founding authority defined by Max Weber in 1921, would owe its source of political legitimacy not to a rational election or a revered tradition, but to the exceptional charisma (personal gift) of an exemplary leader for his demonstrated abilities in a grave and specific historical situation.29

  The Bonapartist character and caudillista profile of the Francoist political system are evident and indisputable, even if one focuses only on the propaganda disseminated with the consent and approval of Franco himself. As has already been pointed out, at the end of 1936 the following compulsory slogans and watchwords in the insurgent rearguard were already in circulation: ‘One Fatherland, One State, One Caudillo’, or ‘The Caesars were the unbeaten generals’. Two years later, the writer and Falangist leader Dionisio Ridruejo bluntly affirmed: ‘The Caudillo is limited only by his own free will.’ Indeed, until the end of his life, Franco was primarily ‘El Caudillo’, the capital institution of the political regime, not only in the judicial-institutional realm but also in the daily exercise of executive and legislative power. For almost 40 years, Franco was always the beneficiary of the three basic characteristics of the caudillo political model: personal exaltation and identification with the supposed destiny of his people; the fullness of power concentrated in his hands; and the lack of institutional control of his exercise of authority since he was only responsible ‘before God and history’. A caudillo, in addition, not only in military (Generalissimo) and political (supreme national chief) terms, but also providential and anointed for his lifetime by the grace of God, which added an element of sacred religious sanction to the theory of the crucial and decisive caudillaje.

  It has already been shown how the legal literature of the regime never failed to underline that Franco founded his authority upon a charismatic legitimacy (not traditional, by succession, nor rational, by election). Torcuato Fernández-Miranda would explain it in an official political doctrine textbook, with a unique reasoning clearly indebted to the political science of Max Weber:

  The head of the Spanish state, born of the national uprising (of 18 July 1936), is constituted in the person of Generalissimo Franco, by virtue of the institution of caudillaje. The Generalissimo is head of state as the caudillo of the crusade. […] The caudillaje is an outstanding title of authority, individual, and in this sense unrepeatable that rests on a right of foundation consecrated by a proclamation and also exceptional adhesion. […] 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. In him resides the authority of the new state.30

  However, the historiographic, sociological and political consensus on this caudillista (Caesarist or Bonapartist) characteristic of Franquismo breaks down when it comes to qualifying more properly and accurately the corresponding regime type, taking as extreme parameters the already-mentioned basic alternative: is it a caudillista regime by nature of its totalitarianism in the mode of the Italian Fascist dictatorship presided over by the Duce, Mussolini, or the National Socialist Third Reich and its doctrine of the Führer Prinzip applied to Hitler? Or rather is it a merely authoritarian caudillista system, similar to the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’ of the jurist and economist Antonio Oliveira Salazar or the Polish dictatorship presided over by a hero of independence like Marshal Pilsudski, with no essential connection to contemporary European fascist totalitarianism?

  The concept of the totalitarian regime was developed during the interwar years and later by several different political scientists and sociologists, mostly from a liberal and social-democratic tradition (Franz Neumann, Hannah Arendt, among others). They essentially took as a model the political structure of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.31 As a political category, the notion of ‘totalitarianism’ was initially based on the theory and reality of the concept of the state articulated by Mussolini in 1922: ‘Everything in the state, nothing outside the state and nothing against the state’ – probably his greatest and most radical doctrinal innovation, according to the analysis of Emilio Gentile.32 After that, the term spread in the political vocabulary of the radical and fascist right to achieve a new crucial political triumph in Germany in 1933, when Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, announced the political goal: ‘Our party has always aspired to the totalitarian state. […] the goal of the revolution [National Socialist] has to be a totalitarian state that penetrates into all spheres of public life.’33

  On the basis of such initial political uses of the term, during the 1950s – in the context of Cold War between the Soviet Bloc and the West – political scientists such as Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski were reformulating the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ to define all dictatorships that presented a series of common characteristics from a formal, exclusively political perspective and without attention to their specific social or class foundations. This definition used as a fundamental criterion the degree of difference of those political systems with respect to the parameters set by liberal democracy (based, in essence, on the division of powers of the state, respect for civil liberties, the universality of the rule of law and the open competition between groups for access to political power through free elections). In this regard, it remains significant that in 1957 Franco himself confessed, in private, to his cousin and personal assistant that he found great similarities between his regime and European totalitarianism, both right-wing and left-wing: ‘Communism, Hitlerism, fascism and Falangism are distinct political systems, but they all have something in common, such as the maintenance of the authority of the state, foundation for the order of a country, social and economic discipline, etc.’34

  In essence, aside from its support and social goals specific to each case (and this is a crucial subject for many analysts), the typology of the totalitarian regime was characterized by the following defining features to varying degrees (historically more fully developed in the German case than in the others):

  1 The presence of a centre of hegemonic power, personified and individualized in a charismatic leader, a duce or führer, exercising his absolute monopoly of authority with no upper restriction or appreciable autonomy for junior or intermediate commanders.

  2 The existence of a single mass party which forms an integral part of the apparatus of the state (even becoming its controlling shadow) that responds to a precise and well-defined ideology, a messianic doctrine (a mode of ‘political religion’) of required knowledge and study by the population.

  3 The claim of absolute control by the state and the party of all political and socio-cultural public activities with the private cultural and social life reducted to a minimum or simply suppressed.

  4 The ma
intenance of a high degree of political mobilization of the population through channels of official regimentation of the one-party state: trade unions, youth organizations, women’s groups, specific cultural associations, etc.

  5 Systematic police control and intense and active repression of all latent or patent opposition and without any degree of freedom of press, speech, assembly, movement and communication.

  6 The desire to control and centralize economic life through ultranationalist and autarkic policies as a vehicle for the military reinforcement of the state in the face of a potential test of superiority in a ‘total war’ against the enemy.

  Without diminishing its hermeneutic consistency, the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ described has been subjected to fair historiographical criticism for its ‘polymorphous, malleable, elastic and, ultimately, ambiguous character’.35 The definition seems insufficient because it responds to a typology of rigid political traits and overlooks very real differences of social implementation or ideological projection between the systems classified as mostly ‘totalitarian’ (Nazism and Communism, basically).

  On this point, particularly relevant are the recent words of Richard Overy in his comparative study of both systems and the method of exercise of power of the two dictators, Hitler and Stalin. According to him, it is clear that Stalinism and Nazism had great similarities in their political forms, popular and cultural control modes, strategies of economic management and utopian social and messianic aspirations. However, they also showed differences in ideology and socio-cultural objectives. Soviet power under Stalin was a totalitarian dictatorship to build the utopia of an international socialist paradise ‘in which everyone would be equal and happy’, regardless of its giant human cost. Nazi power conformed to totalitarianism with a utopian dream ‘of creating an empire of the superior race’ that involved the extermination of its enemies and a biological purification of mankind on a large scale (including the unprecedented genocide of almost 6 million Jews). This key difference in their basic social, political and ideological worldviews ‘explains the war for hegemony between both dictatorships’.36 It could be added, following Enzo Traverso, that such differences also explain their various historical developments: ‘certainly it is not by chance that the Fascist and Nazi regimes were born and died with their leaders, while the Soviet system survived Stalin’s death for nearly 40 years.’37