Franco

by Enrique Moradiellos

The military insurrection corresponded to the characterization that Arno J. Mayer gave to the violent movements of extreme social reaction in the twentieth century as ‘a bayonet in search of an ideology’. […] [On the pro-Franco side] the primitive and absolute social reaction was giving way to a ‘social-national’ discourse, with anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist rhetoric, whose components show such a degree of amalgamation hidden behind the programme of the Falange that it can be defined as a mere fascist formalism which, moreover, was being eroded gradually in the postwar regime and which covers the real plan of preserving the social structures of the Spain of the Restoration, with a new framework for the regimentation of the masses. […] The model of the authoritarian ‘caudillista’ regime was established before the design of the state itself. Franco assumed the four leaderships: state, party, government and army. […] The political connotations were such that in this area, as in the social, it is impossible to speak of a true fascist regime and state, if it is not as a mere matter of formal mimicry. The party was not the owner of the state, nor did the state rest on the party, if we are talking about both with its strict significance within the fascist regimes.46

  Some of the latest and most recent contributions to the subject of the relationship between fascism and Franquismo stress the protean character of the military regime built during the Civil War and its potential either to evolve in a full fascist and totalitarian sense or to come back to a mere reactionary stance given its military origin. As had been perceived by Mussolini from the beginning of the Spanish conflict, the Francoist state, despite its reactionary and autocratic original nature, by virtue of the imposed war and international mobilization, ‘can be used tomorrow as a base for the totalitarian state’. It was expected, therefore, that Franco would lead the process of the fascistization of Spain. The process would mean the penetration by the single party of the administrative public services (including, if possible, the army and police), with the creation of new social agencies (the sindicatos verticales and similar organizations) and the formation of party structures parallel to those of the state and, as far as possible, superior to them. That is to say, ‘a complex, dynamic hybridization’ which entailed ‘a vast field of interaction and entanglement – from the circulation of new ideas to the selective adaptation of institutional, political and stylistic experiments’.47

  Under this analytical perspective, focusing on the historical-evolutionary dynamic, Franquismo would have been a reactionary military regime that suffered a remarkable but unfinished process of fascistization, eventually truncated and watered down by the outcome of World War II and the defeat of Italy and Germany. The nature of ‘fascistized dictatorship’ could be appreciated, in the words of Ismael Saz, for its peculiar ‘ability to combine certain elements of the rigidity peculiar to fascism with the versatility and manoeuvrability of the non-fascists’.48 One of the features of the fascistized regimes was that they could revert to their initial state of authoritarian dictatorial regime. To a great degree, that process of fascistization undertaken, truncated and then reversed is the reason for the difficulties in conceptualizing the Franco regime and is key to its evolutionary and adaptive capacity.

  Ismael Saz has rigorously exposed this interpretation of Francoism as a fascistized regime, potentially equidistant between the fascist totalitarian model and the mere authoritarian dictatorship and able to evolve or stand still in one sense or another. His argument deserves to be quoted fully to appreciate its meaning:

  Franco’s dictatorship rested on the same undemocratic and counter-revolutionary alliance as the Italian or the German, it was as repressive – and in a sense even more – than those; it was structured on the basis of a single party and on the principle of leadership (caudillaje); it had the same centralized and uniform design of the state; it copied much of the essential institutions of the Italian fascist regime; it adopted something like an official ideology; it created structures, allegedly classless and corporative and took refuge in economic autarky; it announced, as did the fascist dictatorships, its purpose to last. However, in each and every one of the cases mentioned, one can find essential differences: the correlation of forces within the counter-revolutionary alliance was never favourable to the fascist sector; its repressive policy annihilating the democratic and labour opposition was only partially accompanied by an effort of remobilization or articulation of consensus; there was some populist politics but far more of the jail, Church and barracks; the single party was really a party unified from above and from outside; the Caudillo was not the expression, depiction or concretion of some form of so-called popular will, but of the divine will – by the grace of God – and the military; the official ideology may or may not be an ideology but it was certainly not a fascist ideology; the Francoist state was less interventionist and more respectful of civil society than the fascist, but it was also better structured; it lacked the anarchic Darwinist connotations, characteristic in greater or lesser degree, of the fascist regimes; no one ever believed in the trade unionism of the Sindicato Vertical, and autarky, more than obeying the internal logic of the fascist regimes, even, eventually, went against the interests of key sectors of the great capital, connected perfectly with autarkic, defensive, tendencies of capitalism that rather than being expansionist sought internal protection.49

  The consideration of the Franco regime as a military caudillista regime subjected to an intense process of fascistization during the Civil War has also been developed by Ferran Gallego in his more recent works, particularly in El Evangelio Fascista (The Fascist Gospel).50 According to his accurate analysis, the fascistization of the conservative Spanish right had been very deep in the years prior to the Civil War as it had assumed and integrated a good deal of the ideas, projects, rituals and symbols of Spanish fascism-Falangism. That dynamic would reach its culmination with the Civil War, when the novelty provided by Falangism became a key element of the ‘new Francoist political culture’: the palingenetic organic nationalism, the modern renewal of tradition, elitism combined with the mobilization of masses, the defence of order coupled with the demand for social justice, the fascination with technocracy and social Darwinist vitalism and extremely charismatic caudillismo. For this reason, in his view, fascism penetrated the depths of Francoism not only as a ‘social function’ but also as a project for the construction of a ‘national-syndicalist state’, even if it was led by a military leader. In any case, that process was truncated from 1943 for reasons of internal attrition as much as by the loss of external opportunities linked to the world war. In the consequent pragmatic reflux, the original fascist component was displaced and eclipsed in favour of others equally present in the Francoist cultural synthesis (particularly National Catholicism) and without serious ruptures (neither ideological, nor in political staff, nor in forms of the exercise of personal power). In the words of Ferran Gallego: ‘Fascism was not abandoned, but overcome in the regime’s own evolution as an ideological means to integrate all its elements.’51

  By virtue of these considerations, it is now increasingly rare to define Francoism as a truly fascist and totalitarian regime. The dominant perception now that it was a military dictatorship first fascistized and then transformed into an essentially authoritarian regime, despite the fascistic features, which remained until the end.

  For example, at the end of the 1990s, a fruitful comparative analysis of the interwar European regimes by Gregory M. Luebbert still considered that the Franco regime showed ‘the more diluted character of Spanish fascism’.52 However, more recently, a leading expert in the history of European fascism, Emilio Gentile, wrote that, in Franquismo, ‘the Falangist movement was reduced to being a support of a military authoritarian regime, which confined it to a subordinate and marginal position’.53 In 2004, in his comparison between Italian Fascism and Spanish Francoism, Gentile advanced conclusions that lowered the so-called ‘affinity’ between the two regimes and criticized the tendency to ‘exaggerate the similarities rather than the differences’
, with express reference to the charismatic leadership of both leaders:

  The analogy between the figures of both ‘leaders’ is, in fact, superficial, since it does not consider the substantial differences between the Duce – a professional politician, with training and a revolutionary mentality, an enemy of the traditional establishment, who came to power as head of a mass movement organized in a party militia which was always the main pillar of his personal power – and the Caudillo – a professional soldier, with a conservative mentality and training when not directly reactionary, integrated within the traditional establishment, who came to power as a general in the army, and whose political power rested on the armed forces.54

  The judgement of Gentile was confirmed at the same time by another leading specialist in the phenomenon of interwar European fascism, Robert O. Paxton, who pointed out that the crisis of the 1930s in Spain ‘led to Franco’s military dictatorship rather than to power for the leader of the fascist Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera’.55 A few years ago, in 2013, Enzo Traverso also discounted the applicability of the category of totalitarian fascism to the Francoist regime for similar motives:

  Francoist repression, during the Spanish Civil War, was particularly fierce and widespread, but the ideology of the regime, founded on Catholicism and the myth of the eternal Spain, was too traditionalist and its social base, in which the clergy and large property owners played a fundamental role, too conservative to build a totalitarian project. Francoism appears, then, against Italian Fascism and Nazism, as the authoritarian and violent variant (particularly in its origins) of a classic military dictatorship, without official ideology (outside of Catholicism and nationalism), with neither revolutionary pretensions nor millenarian aspirations.56

  In the same vein, one could include the assessment of Julián Sanz Hoya in 2013, one of the last Spanish historians to have reflected on the role of fascism in the shaping and duration of Franquismo. In his view, similar to that of Emilio Gentile, Robert O. Paxton or Enzo Traverso and not too far from that of Ismael Saz or Ferran Gallego, if the fascistization of the regime had its clear boundaries, the defascistization was not complete even in the final stages of the dictatorship:

  The new FET-JONS (created in April 1937) was subordinate to Franco and was based on a fusion of political and ideological Falangism and traditionalism, fascism and National Catholicism, but that did not prevent the Falangist component from always being hegemonic in the party. Its control was the base from which the Falangists boosted their offensives in the struggle for power, in the pursuit of their longed-for acquisition of a totalitarian hegemony or to expand or sustain specific plots for power and influence. These conflicts were solved with apparent defeats as with undeniable achievements, ambiguous victories and, above all, frequent compromises. […] Franco knew well that he needed the party of which he was national leader to perpetuate himself in power, to counter the other right-wing tendencies and sustain the efforts of social legitimation of the dictatorship. And on the other hand, the successive losses of Falangist political weight did not prevent the leaders of the movement from retaining until the very end a relevant power share, supported by a strong political and clientelist network.57

  It is highly unlikely that the lively debate about the nature of the Franco regime has finished with these contributions, which although not exhaustive are some of the most relevant. There is no doubt that the controversy has been very fruitful and has contributed to the critical rethinking of the nature and defining features of the peculiar political system headed by General Franco and the reasons for its undoubted social foundations and its lengthy historical duration. If that political regime had to be defined in a concise and brief way, one could resort to Franco’s own words in a speech in Seville on 16 April 1953: ‘In short: we are the counterpart of the Republic.’58

  Indeed, the regime moulded by Franco to his image and likeness was the outright denial of Republican democracy and the political institutionalization of his military victory over reformism and the revolutionary spectre believed to be behind it which prevailed in Spain between 1931 and 1936. The anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary and dictatorial character did not suffer during the long evolution of the regime and the ongoing biography of its titular head, despite pragmatic changes in tune with the evolution of the international context. As the Caudillo acknowledged in his message of the end of 1964, celebrating the 25 years of existence of his regime: ‘During the long period of time we have governed, adapting the standards to the times in which we had to live, faithful to the principles that justified our intervention in public life.’59

  For this reason, one would reiterate that probably the only defining constant feature of Franquismo as a political regime was the presence of General Franco as caudillo and dictator with sovereign powers, ‘lifetime ruler’ and only responsible ‘before God and history’. Perhaps the imperviousness of the unperturbed Caudillo lay in his desire to cling on to absolute power. This was appreciated very early by ‘Pacón’, his loyal cousin and military assistant, who related it in his private diary:

  I have always believed (and I know him very well) that he cannot make way for another person as head of state. I repeat that Franco is Franquista one hundred per cent, and that he will not give power to any other person voluntarily.60

  The Times of Francoism and its Modulations

  The different stages of Francoism – its periodization – provide a good basic framework for the study of the regime. As should already be obvious, the long duration of the Franco regime, along with its evident correlative evolution, mean it is essential to pay special attention to the chronological dimensions as a basis for its study and rigorous historical understanding. As Javier Tusell remarked in 1988: ‘To a large extent, the peculiarity of Franco resides in his long-lasting rule.’61 Tusell was not alone in that regard, as evidenced by the judgement of Stanley G. Payne, just one year before, in his canonical book:

  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 its persistence […]. The system of Franco had a longer history and suffered more historical changes than the majority of non-Marxist dictatorships.62

  Much more recently, in 2014, a global study of the dictatorship by Miguel Ángel Giménez Martínez began with a crucial starting premise:

  It is difficult to provide a clear conceptualization of a regime that lasted for more than three decades and which was transformed to the beat of the political, economic and social circumstances. So, the Franco regime arose at the time of development of European fascisms, subsequently coincided with the so-called ‘developmental dictatorships’ of the 1960s, and finally disappeared in the context of a generalized crisis of dictatorships.63

  The shared warning of Tusell, Payne and Giménez Martínez is relevant because, quite simply, historical analysis is based on a simultaneous considera­tion of the spatial and temporal axes of any human phenomenon. As the classic aphorism states, the Muse named Clio had two equally beautiful eyes: one saw chronology and the other geography. The discipline of history, in essence, is nothing more than a human science that tries to study social phenomena in time and space in order to understand and explain the processes of evolutionary forms of human society. By virtue of the inescapable spatial–temporal nature of historical phenomena, one cannot embark upon a historiographical work without due consideration of the chronology. This requires the hard work of ‘periodization’: to categorize the past, which is continuous and ungeneralizable, into discrete blocks of time, however imprecise. In fact, without such ‘named periods’, the past would be nothing more than scattered events lacking a framework through which to understand them. In Thomas Mann’s classic phrase, ‘Time has no divisions to mark its passage.’ However, historians (and human beings in general) do need to mark such passages of time to try to understand the past, as Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre remarked in 1932: ‘There is no methodological problem of grea
ter importance within the field of history than that of periodization.’64 Half a century ago, in a text published posthumously in 1956, José Ortega y Gasset tellingly expressed this same principle:

  We began to persuade ourselves that in history the chronology is not, as often believed, a denominatio extrinseca but, on the contrary, the more substantive. The date of a human reality, whatever it is, is its most constitutive attribute. It transforms the figure which refers to the date from a purely arithmetic or astronomical meaning, into the name and notion of a historical reality. […] Each historical date is the technical name and conceptual abbreviation – in short, the definition – of a general form of life constituted by the repertoire of experiences, verbal, intellectual, moral, etc., which ‘reign’ in a given society.65

  In view of the long duration of Franquismo, the introduction of its chronological boundaries implies, in turn, the determination of stages, phases or significant periods within the contemporary history of Spain. Here, for the first time, appears the need to describe Francoism with temporary denotations such as ‘first Franquismo’, ‘final Franquismo’. It seems clear that from a historiographic perspective it is not possible to consider the period of the initial configuration of the system, in the context of the Civil War in Spain and of the pre-world war, with Franco in the fullness of his life and physical and mental faculties, in the same way as we consider the end of the regime, in the context of international détente, deep Spanish internal socio-economic transformations and the Caudillo suffering a serious deterioration of his mental faculties and physical decline. In other words, the historian is obliged to break up, to periodize, the time of Franco to find ‘spaces of intelligibility’ within its global evolution. That is to say, to identify spatial–temporal fractions of a historical phenomenon defined by a particular combination of factors (whether social, economic, political or cultural) that create a uniquely stable situation, without prejudice to the whole.