Spain: A Unique History (38 page)

The initial political and intellectual leader of a fascist enterprise in Spain was not José Antonio but Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, the young postal functionary who provided perhaps the most clear-cut example of the radical political intellectual in early twentieth-century Spain. Ledesma originally defined national syndicalism, the basic doctrine of Falangism, as well as coining some of the major Falangist slogans. In 1933-34 he understood the essence of fascism better than José Antonio, but lacked charisma and the capacity for leadership, though he and his thinking were too aggressive to be satisfied with second place, leading almost inevitably to the breakdown of the relationship between the two and Ledesma's expulsion from the movement at the beginning of 1935.
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Political rivalry was important in this split, but the role of ideas and political strategy even more central. This had to do with avoiding the imitation of Italian Fascism, adopting a more revolutionary program and strategy, and forming broader alliances aimed at seizing power. On these points, Ledesma may be said to have lost the battle but won the war, for after his expulsion José Antonio sought to move the Falange to the "left," and to formally disassociate it from Italian Fascism, though he was never able to form effective alliances (which had been fundamental in Mussolini's and Hitler's rise to power). Leaders of the Comintern took this last point more to mind than José Antonio, switching a few months later from revolutionary isolation (the tactic of Falangism) to the more common fascist tactic of alliance formation when they officially adopted the tactic of the Popular Front in August 1935.

José Antonio sought a more independent path for the Falange, even while arranging a subsidy from the Italian government and appearing informally at a meeting of Mussolini's abortive "fascist international" to explain that the difficulties facing this sort of movement were more severe in Spain than in some other countries. If the Falange was becoming somewhat less "Italian," it became in some ways even more generically fascist in 1935, emphasizing a sort of "left-fascist economics" of national syndicalism, though the corporatism of the latter was supposed to give it a partial independence from the state, in terms that were never convincingly explained. The attempted de-Italianization led José Antonio to condemn briefly the idea of the monolithic "corporative state" and of "totalitarianism," but all without the slightest indication of any kind of political goals and structure that would be other than rigidly authoritarian. His attempt to separate Falangism from Italian Fascism was never completed, and probably impossible. He was more successful, however, in differentiating both Falangism and "fascism" from what he termed "Hitlerism," which he declared to be racist, mystical, and romantic, lacking the clarity of principles and doctrines of Italian Fascism.

José Antonio's attempt to lead what he termed "a poetic movement" led to tactical and ideological confusion. One of the standard descriptions of fascism is that it represented an attempt to "estheticize politics," and this was amply reflected in the Falangist emphasis on "style," but the movement soon had to face a grimmer reality. A doctrine of violence could not be avoided, though never defined with the theoretical sophistication of the Italians. Both Ledesma and Onésimo Redondo, the number three leader, endorsed violence, while José Antonio held that it was worthwhile in a "just cause," for the "patria," which somewhat paralleled the position of the Left on that issue. Because his father had been able to rule as dictator with relatively minimal violence in the quieter 1920s, José Antonio at first naively assumed that a new authoritarian system could also be imposed with relatively limited violence, but soon found himself caught up in a spiral of killing that he could not control.

One thing different about Spain, compared with other western European countries, was the strong emphasis on violence by the revolutionary Left. It was true that in Germany and Italy political violence in 1918-19 had been initiated by the Left, but in those countries they generally rejected violence, which was practiced only by a minority of the extreme Left and soon became the preferred tactic of the extreme Right. In Spain, all the principal worker parties preached and practiced violence, whereas the parties of the Right, whatever their long-term goals, pursued legal tactics. Thus Ledesma would accurately write in 1935 that "
In Spain the right is apparently fascist, but in many respect antifascist
" (italics his), for, though nationalist and in varying degrees tending toward authoritarianism, it eschewed violence and generally obeyed the law. Conversely, "
the left is apparently antifascist, but, in many respects, essentially fascist
" because of its propensity for violence and revolutionary authoritarianism.
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This explained why the emergence of a fascist movement in Spain had been met by a wave of violence not initiated by the Falangists themselves, but which served only to elicit further the strain of violence that was at least partially implicit in José Antonio's "poetic movement." This does not mean that the Left was to blame for Falangist violence, but simply that leftist violence and Falangist violence soon became locked in a self-reenforcing dialectic that José Antonio, naively, had not foreseen.

All fascist-type movements were, however, singular, differentiated by national characteristics even more than was the case among Communist movements. In that of the Falange, revolutionary nationalism was mediated, often uneasily and contradictorily, by an attempted symbiosis with cultural and religious traditionalism. The "new man" sought by nearly all revolutionary movements, fascist or otherwise, was in the Spanish case less novel and more characterized by traditional values, a tendency that placed Falangism on a kind of cusp between revolutionary fascism and national tradition as affirmed by the radical Right. But whereas the Catholic CEDA expressed its Catholic values by adhering to republican legality, the partial espousal of Catholic values by the violent and revolutionary Falange created cognitive dissonance.

José Antonio only added to such ambiguity by defining the goals of his movement in binary or antinomic terms. He suggested several times that if key objectives of firm leadership, national unity, cultural identity, and a dynamic new national economic policy were fully assumed by other groups, such as patriotic Socialists, he would be prepared to retire from politics. Immediately after the Popular Front elections in 1936, he suggested a momentary truce to see if the new Azaña government might lead to a national political breakthrough. No other party leader expressed so binary an approach.

During 1935 José Antonio was seeking a more distinctly national revolutionary doctrine. Some of his ideas were in flux, and where these might have led in another ten years cannot be known. Ironically, just as the Communists were, after fifteen years, abandoning the tactic of revolutionary insurrectionism in favor of political alliance, José Antonio and the Falangist leaders began to embrace insurrectionism. This was a different example of the reverse radicalization to which Ledesma referred. Through the Popular Front, the Communists were adopting the fascist tactic of seeking power legally through alliance and elections. José Antonio, unable to form an alliance, was thrown back on the Communist tactic of insurrection on which the Comintern had relied for fifteen years, always without success.

The turn toward revolutionary isolationism proved disastrous. There was no hope of gaining military support for armed revolt in 1935, and when the CEDA offered the Falange a realistic electoral alliance in 1936 — one seat for José Antonio, all that the party's scant numbers merited — it was rejected by party leaders in favor of continued isolationism. Loss of a seat in the Cortes may have proven fatal to José Antonio, leaving him to an arrest of dubious legality and prosecution on a series of (sometimes artificial) charges that kept him in prison until events were overtaken by the Civil War.

Like most leaders of national fascist parties, José Antonio was a failure. He failed either to win many supporters or gain allies. On their own, fascist movements managed to seize power in only two countries, though one of them was potentially the most powerful in Europe. Even so, scarcely any other principal national party did so poorly as the Falange in the elections of 1936, with only 0.7 percent of the vote. Fascist parties did proportionately better in Holland and Sweden, two consolidated democracies. Young volunteers finally began to flock to the party during the national crisis of the spring of 1936, but fascism in Spain had no alternative to the Communist tactic of insurrection and civil war, though in every instance where a fascist movement attempted it (Germany 1923, Austria 1934, Portugal 1935, Romania 1941), it failed. Success in any insurrection would depend on the army, and the cost of this was complete subordination of the movement.

José Antonio tried to bargain with General Mola for political terms, but these were limited to freedom of action for propaganda and party organization, not a share of power, and that only for so long as the Falangists fully committed themselves to the military insurgency. The terms in which the Falangists cooperated with the revolt of July 18 recognized the complete political and military leadership, indeed domination, of the military.

By the time that the Civil War began, José Antonio was totally marginalized. The scope and ferocity of the conflict genuinely horrified him, for, like the extremists on both sides, he had thought exclusively in terms of an insurrection that would involve no more than a "mini"-civil war of no more than a week or two. José Antonio was not a total fanatic and, faced with the danger of national self-destruction, preferred national reconciliation, even under a democratic republic. Hence his proposal of August 10, 1936, to travel to the Nationalist zone to try to negotiate a compromise. This would have meant indefinite postponement of his own political goals, but there is no reason to consider him insincere. This was another expression of his radical binary approach, which he had revealed before. In his final writings in prison before his execution, fascism became remote. He could be said to have entered a post-political phase of thinking, as he turned toward spiritual perspectives and a kind of metahistorical outlook.
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The Civil War nonetheless created a certain "fascist situation" in the Nationalist zone. Although the Falangists held no state power, they suddenly became the largest single political group, expanding numerically even more rapidly than the Communists in the Republican zone. They constituted a political presence that could not be ignored — though it could readily have been held at arm's length.

Franco chose not to do that, but to take control of the movement for his own purposes. In the next chapter I draw attention to the fact that, so far as can be determined, he had no such plan at the beginning of the revolt and very probably not as late as October 1,1936, when he formally assumed power. He was responding to the radicalized conditions of the Civil War and the "fascist situation" in the Nationalist zone. Once Franco and Serrano Súñer decided to take over the movement, this was easy to do. The Falange had always been weak in leadership, and after the elimination of José Antonio, leadership was weaker than ever and also seriously divided. The fascistic cult of "The Absent One" made it temporarily impossible to select a new national chief and news of the death of José Antonio was long suppressed, with no strong and capable replacement available. If the expansion of the Falange and the terms of the Civil War created a "fascist situation," the rigorous new dictatorship in turn foreclosed the possibilities of anything other than an official state party under Franco, a certainty more or less recognized by the internally divided Falangist leaders as they sought to negotiate with the Carlists — the only other significant paramilitary force supporting the war effort — to achieve some sort of unity, or at least common understanding. This proved impossible, however, as a party initiative alone.

By the spring of 1937 Franco was ready to begin the structuring of an alternative regime, the notion of the authoritarian reorganization of the Republic having been abandoned. Yet he took only minimal steps in elaborating a complete new political system so long as the war lasted. The question may be asked: What exactly did he intend by the creation of the Falange Española Tradicionalista as state party in April of that year?

Some of Franco's partisans would later emphasize the ad hoc and open-ended aspects of this move, pointing out his willingness to accept members from all the non-Left parties and his announcement that formation of the new entity and official adoption of the Falangist Twenty-Six Points were a point of departure and not a final definition of the new regime. Franco was certainly not prepared to construct a complete system and obviously wanted to keep many of his options open, but he made it abundantly clear that the new state would be a radically authoritarian regime drawing considerable inspiration from its fascist allies.

Since the "Reds" normally called their enemies simply "fascists," was this not then the beginning of Europe's third fascist regime? The Franco regime had quickly become a rigid dictatorship and a one-party state, was engaged in a desperate war, and had just adopted a fascist-type program as its official ideology. This looked very much like a fascist regime, and yet subsequently most historians would tend to agree that it was not strictly fascist per se, though it certainly underwent major fascist influence and exhibited certain fascist characteristics, so that, as Ismael Saz puts it, if not "fascist" it was at least "fascistized."
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That may be as good a way of saying it as any.

The veteran "old shirts" of the party accepted the new arrangement for lack of anything better and still hoped for the triumph of the "national syndicalist revolution," but it is doubtful that Franco even altogether understood what the latter was supposed to mean. At that time, the FET was only the third fascist-type party in power and, save for the interlude in Romania, there would be no other, except for the Independent State of Croatia, part of Hitler's imperium from 1941 to 1944. By point of comparison one might observe that the only party truly in power was Hitler's National Socialists, for Mussolini had invented the term "totalitarian" without fully carrying out a Totalitarian Party revolution in Italy, though the Fascist Party was certainly larger, more important and influential than the FET ever was.