In Europe

by Geert Mak

  King Alfons decided to test the mood of his country. He saw the municipal elections of Sunday, 12 April, 1931 as a litmus test for his own popularity. The results were ambiguous. All over the countryside his supporters maintained their majority, but in the cities the republicans won resoundingly. Rumour also had it that many villagers had been pressured by their landlords into voting for the royalists.

  The next day, in a number of provincial capitals, the republic was proclaimed. The day after that the streets of Madrid filled with demonstrators. In the end, Alfons bowed to their demand that he ‘leave the city before sunset’. It was the only way, he said, to prevent a civil war: ‘Last Sunday's elections showed that I am no longer loved by my people.’

  Power, from that moment on, lay for the first time in the hands of the reformers, in the hands of a ‘young and eager Spain’. All over the country, construction began on new schools, hospitals, playgrounds, residential districts and holiday centres. But Spain soon became unmanageable. The Archbishop of Toledo refused to recognise the new republic – and was promptly forced into exile. New laws on education and divorce were not enforced. Rather than enact a single agricultural reform, the landowners preferred to chase the small farmers from their land. A general strike, and a miners’ strike in Asturias, were violently crushed.

  Five years later, during the parliamentary elections of February 1936, the right tried to regain power by legal means. The right-wing parties, monarchists and Carlists banded together to form the National Front. Their plan failed: the absolute majority went to the left-wing coalition of the Popular Front. Tension swiftly mounted. During the four months after the election, according to a member of the parliamentary opposition, there were 269 political murders and 1,287 reported cases of assault, 160 churches were burned, 69 political party headquarters and 10 newspapers were plundered, and 113 general and 228 smaller strikes crippled the nation. Although these figures may not be perfectly reliable, they provide an indication of the country's mood during the first half of 1936.

  It is a strange contradiction: Spain, the country that lived longest under a fascist dictatorship, actually offered no fertile ground for a fascist ideology. The country lacked the ingredients that had brought fascism to bloom elsewhere: embittered veterans, massive urban unemployment, frustrated national ambitions. And the country had traditional forces to hold it together, most particularly the church and the king. Initially, therefore, the ideas advanced by the radical right-wing Falange Española barely caught on: in the 1936 elections, the movement received only 44,000 votes (0.6 per cent). The right wing of the population felt more at home in the traditional Catholic and monarchist parties.

  Unlike that in Italy, Germany, Hungary and Rumania, Spain's nascent fascism was primarily an intellectual movement. Its founder, the philosopher Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, was one of the best-read men in Madrid. The rest of the young coterie which – exhilarated by the takeover in Germany – set up the Falange Española in summer 1933 also consisted largely of nationalist writers and intellectuals. At first, their party organ FE resembled nothing so much as a literary journal; an angry Falangist wrote that ‘if FE maintains such a literary and intellectual tone, there is little reason for a vendor to risk his life selling it’. This was no demagoguery: the first victim in Madrid was a student who, purely out of curiosity, bought a copy of the first issue and was promptly shot. The magazine paid little heed to militaristic Germany, but almost half of its foreign reporting dealt with Italy. The publication was hardly anti-Semitic, but it did point out that the ‘Jewish problem’ in Spain was not a racial problem, but a religious one.

  The most important leader of the Falange was José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He too was a typical intellectual, a young and successful lawyer, a man like so many to be found in Europe in the 1930s: a reader, a thinker, a searcher. José Antonio was the son of the old Primo de Rivera, and showed it: in his nonconformity and his disgust for political parties, and in his belief in leadership and ‘intuition’. As he admitted openly, his only real ambition was to continue his father's work. And love was his tragic flaw. He fell head over heels for a young duchess, a certain Pilar Azlor de Aragón. The affection was mutual, but the girl's father, a conservative monarchist, turned aside all proposals of marriage. He regarded the old Primo de Rivera as a parvenu who had cast shame on the monarchy, and wanted absolutely nothing to do with his son. Still, through various channels, José Antonio stayed in contact with the love of his life for many years.

  José Antonio was the prototype of the classical Spanish hero: the man who chooses not for happiness but for his destiny, a man for whom the words ‘honour’ and ‘pain’ have special value. He was certainly not timid: when two bombs were thrown at his car in April 1934 – they failed to explode – he jumped out, chased his assailants down the street and even exchanged a few volleys with them. In the Cortes he punched a socialist parliamentarian who accused his father of ‘robbery’, and so precipitated a free-for-all between deputies of left and right.

  However, his biographer Stanley Payne writes that José Antonio lacked ‘the fascist temperament’. He was too generous, too broadminded, too liberal. He continued to associate with friends of different political persuasions, he recognised the human side of his opponents and struggled with inconsistencies in his own thinking.

  During those years the major ideological discussions were held not between left and right, but within the right: between old aristocrats and technocrats, between racists and non-racists, between elitist conservatives who wanted to follow the example of the Portuguese professor-dictator António Salazar and the modern young people who favoured a popular movement along the lines of Mussolini's. And through it all ran the dividing line between radicals and non-radicals. Salazar, Franco, the Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas and even Mussolini allowed the old existing order more or less to go on existing, and even won authority because of that. The German and Austrian Nazis were much more radical; they had absolutely no interest in making compromises, either with the church or with any other established order.

  José Antonio, in fact, occupied a position somewhere between the two camps, but he was not fond of the Nazis. He considered them a ‘turgid expression of German Romanticism’. Mussolini interested him much more: the Italian leader had actually been able to develop a modern, right-wing form of government without the maladies of class and democracy. Still, in his later articles and speeches, José Antonio systematically avoided the term ‘fascism’. For his movement he favoured an authentic, Spanish form, and he attempted to reconcile tradition and the modern age, secularisation and religion, regional autonomy and central authority, mysticism and rationality.

  From 1934, José Antonio began giving more serious consideration to an armed revolt. Late in that year he wrote a ‘postcard to a Spanish soldier’, addressing it to several senior army officers: in it, he said that the Spanish bourgeoisie had been poisoned by foreign ideas, that the proletarian masses were under the spell of Marxism, and that the military was the only group capable of filling the vacuum of this ‘non-existent state’. The generals paid him little heed. The most important among them, Franco, paid him no heed whatsoever. In September 1935, however, the plans grew more serious. At the Parador de Gredos, close to Madrid, he and his colleagues developed a complete scenario for a coup, to be led by the Falange. (That same plan was actually carried out in part one year later, but then by the army.) And as though the Devil had a hand in it: it was at that same hotel, during those same days, that his great love Pilar Azlor de Aragón spent her wedding night with her new husband, an aristocrat and a naval officer. She had capitulated at last. For José Antonio it was, in his own words, ‘the most horrific night of my life’.

  Almost six months later, in February 1936, he was arrested along with a few other Falangists. The charge was clearly trumped up: the authorities said they had broken a seal the police had put on the door of their headquarters. But other charges quickly followed: illegal assembly, illegal possession
of firearms and – after an emotional outburst – contempt of court. At last, on 6 June, José Antonio spat a pure declaration of war in the face of the republican government: ‘There are no more peaceful solutions.’ And: ‘So let there be this war, this violence, in which we not only defend the existence of the Falange, but the very existence of Spain itself.’ He himself, however, remained torn by inner doubt. He realised all too well that the revolt could fail, clearing the way for a long and disastrous civil war.

  Meanwhile, the violence in the streets came to a head. In the night of 13 July, 1936, the monarchist parliamentarian José Calvo Sotelo was abducted by a handful of socialist militia members and, in true Soviet style, executed with a bullet to the back of his head. In some ways the attack was the mirror image of the murder of the Italian parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti twelve years earlier. Like Matteotti, Sotelo was a prominent politician, and the reactions were equally vehement. There was a difference, however: Mussolini had been able to pilot his government safely through that crisis, but with this murder the Spanish republicans forfeited the last chance of a peaceful solution. Less than a week later, the civil war began.

  Those who went to war against each other in Spain were of widely varied backgrounds. There were law-abiding Catholics who defended the republic. There were equally upstanding Catholics who fought along with Franco. By way of the Comintern, the Soviet-controlled Communist International, some 40,000 volunteers to the International Brigade had been recruited to go to war against fascism. The young anarchists, on the other hand, wanted more: they were striving for a revolution of their own. Spanish farm boys fought against their landlords. Franco's conservative supporters fought against communism, but what they were really fighting against was progress. Their German allies, on the other hand, were quite progressive; they wanted above all to try out their new weapons. The Italians joined in for the sake of prestige. And so everyone in Spain fought their own war.

  There were at least three major conflicts going on throughout the Spanish Civil War. There was the war between Franco and the republic. At the same time, there was a revolution going on within the republic, an extremely militant popular anarchist movement that was finally crushed by the communists and the middle classes. And finally, in the background, was the third conflict: between the Old Right and the New Right, between the right that only wanted to defend the old order, and the right that wanted to change and modernise that society by authoritarian, non-democratic means. In other words, between Francisco Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

  Franco's coup was intended to be a straightforward revolt that would be over within a few days. But because Franco's grab for power was only partly successful, a long civil war ensued. The generals were unable to secure more than a third of the country. That gave the republicans enough time to mobilise their militias and build an army of their own. In addition, it also gave the smouldering anarchist revolution the chance to flare up and spread across the country. It was in part precisely their own coup that unleashed the ‘leftist chaos’ the generals had been hoping to prevent.

  From his prison cell in Alicante, José Antonio foresaw the disastrous consequences of Franco's demi-coup. There are clear indications that he made a complete about-face in his thinking during the first weeks of the civil war. He wrote letters to the republican government, offered his services as a mediator – members of his family could be held as hostages – and proposed the establishment of a government of ‘national reconciliation’. In other words, he did everything in his power to tether the forces he himself had summoned up.

  The republican government was not oblivious to the opportunity Primo de Rivera was offering. But the situation was simply too chaotic for them to take advantage it. After September, a new and more radical government came to power. Most of the new government ministers were not interested in a compromise. Too much blood had already been spilled for that.

  José Antonio's trial, which finally began on 16 November, was grim. He was accused of ‘mutiny’, which was not far from the truth. He was an experienced lawyer and handled his own defence. Yet the proceedings seemed to sweep right past him, ‘like a man listening intently to the rain’. Only when he heard the death sentence passed against him did he lose his composure. He faced the firing squad, along with four other political prisoners, in the prison yard at Alicante in the early morning of 20 November. All that is left to say about it is this: all five of them stood against the wall with the same fatalistic dignity that thousands of Spaniards, from the left and from the right, showed in the face of death in those years.

  Years later, in the Valle de los Caídos, the ‘Valley of the Fallen’ outside Madrid, I saw the two of them lying together in that grisly Falangist church-cum-charnel house: José Antonio on one side of the altar, Franco on the other. There were three wreaths on Franco's grave, José Antonio had one. They were watched over by thin-lipped angels with faces of stone, their hair pulled back severely, their noses pointed and wings sharp, and between their feet a sword. Visitors came and went, a Mass was held there each morning.

  The grave reveals the character of the one within. The basilica that is their final resting place looks like a Russian subway station, but three times as big and ten times as oppressive, with enough space for 40,000 fallen nationalists. The hacking away of the rock alone claimed fourteen lives. ‘Punitive detachments’ and ‘labour battalions’ of former republicans worked on the basilica for sixteen years. The remains of the barracks that once housed 20,000 convicts are still tucked away in the nearby woods. No room here for reconciliation: the republicans were to remain in their unmarked graves, along the roads and in the fields, rotting in hell.

  The weather that day was appropriate: a thick mist hung over the hills, the cross atop the mountain appeared only now and then from the clouds, showers clattered down on the immense forecourt. The visitors gazed in awe at the crucifixes painted in blood, the rigid faces of the Virgins, the lamps in the form of whetted swords, at the bodies stretched out on the altar of the fallen, and at the endless, empty stone expanse before this blasphemous temple where Spain still comes to pray.

  It is one of history's most macabre jokes, this common resting place for two men who could not stand each other in life. This cult of martyrdom, unlike anything else in modern Europe, in no way fits the intellectual José Antonio. Franco, however, is another case: he could not have cared less, all he needed was a symbol and so, without the slightest hesitation, he annexed all those traits of José Antonio's that he did not himself possess.

  José Antonio enjoyed nightlife, risks and women. Franco was a mama's boy who detested the escapades of his skirt-chasing father. José Antonio was an impassioned politician. Franco was an unscrupulous pragmatist, who placed power above all else, a brilliant opportunist, and at the same time a typical ‘little man’, scarred for life by the lower middle class’ rancour towards the casual privileges of the aristocracy. ‘Down with the intellectuals.’ This was the creed on which he had been suckled in the Foreign Legion.

  At the end of his life, José Antonio tried desperately but fruitlessly to close the lid on the chest of demons he had opened. Franco kept the tightest control over the story of his own life; in that regard he was an uncommonly gifted manipulator. His military career during the days of the republic, the coup, the bloodbaths after the civil war, the defeat of his political allies in the Second World War, the American plans to liberate Spain in 1945 (scotched by Churchill at the last moment) and a dictatorship covering almost forty years; Franco got away with it all.

  And so too with José Antonio's legacy. Up to the moment of the coup itself, Franco was not interested in the Falange Española. That interest was only aroused when the movement began growing by leaps and bounds. Within a few weeks, more than half of Franco's volunteer troops consisted of Falangists. Ultimately, more than 170,000 Spaniards would join the Falangist militia. At the same time, after José Antonio's death, the movement went increasingly awry. The party bosses flaunted
fascist symbols, donned extravagant uniforms and terrorised the cities in stolen limousines. The party organs even began adopting the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was cited eagerly and often.

  Franco had no difficulty in co-opting this runaway movement within the space of only a few months, and incorporating it into his new Falange. Suddenly the general spoke with pride of his close ties with José Antonio, suddenly an entire body of myth had been created around the Falangist pioneer and his ‘natural heir’ Franco. In reality, the general had not lifted a finger to free José Antonio from his cell; it had not been in his interests. In fact, when the perfect opportunity to free him with the help of the German Navy presented itself in October 1936, Franco raised so many objections that the operation was called off. And when his Falangist rival was executed, the general kept that fact under wraps. Franco's propaganda machine made skilful use of José Antonio's prolonged absence. In private, Franco even suggested that José Antonio may have been handed over to the Russians, ‘and it is possible that they've castrated him’. Only in November 1938 was his death publicly confirmed.

  In his cell, immediately after the outbreak of the civil war, José Antonio wrote an analysis of Spain's future, should the nationalists win that war. ‘A group of generals of honourable intentions but of abysmal political mediocrity … And behind them: Old Carlism, intransigent, boorish, antipathetic; the conservative classes, fixed on their own interests, shortsighted, lazy; agrarian and finance capitalism, that is to say: the end for many years of any possibility of building a modern Spain; the lack of any national sense of long-range perspective.’

  His Falange became the stalking horse for all this. In the end, it was also to become the longest lived right wing totalitarian movement in Europe; from the first small groups to its dismantling in 1977, forty-six years in all.