Spain: A Unique History (40 page)

The ensuing political crisis of August-September 1942 was not as important as that of the preceding year. Stemming from unresolved domestic conflicts, it completed the rebalancing that Franco had begun in 1941. In neither case, however, were Franco's new political appointments intended to be part of any process of defascistization. Even in September 1942 he was not ready for that, but maintained the posture that he had assumed in 1937 of leading a one-party state that contained multiple political strands, while continuing to hold in abeyance any final resolution of the regime structure. In 1942 Franco still held firmly to the "fascistized" model, even though, for the aforementioned reasons, he remained reluctant to create a fully fascist regime. Thus he continued throughout 1942 to believe that the fascist-style one-party state would remain dominant in most of Europe, and he showed no interest in any alternative model.

The first indication of a change in perspective came at the very end of 1942, when apparently he abandoned the idea that Germany could win a clear-cut victory in the war and therefore that conditions could ever favor Spain's participation. Even during the first half of 1943, however, this did not lead to abandonment of the "fascistized" model, for the regime then hoped to encourage an arbitrated settlement that would still leave Germany the most important continental power, even if not fully victorious, and therefore ensure the continuation of the Axis state model.

The second and more decisive point of inflection came in July-August 1943, with the downfall of Mussolini. This created panic reactions within the FET, though at first Franco maintained his customary complacency and imperturbability. Within a month, however, he had assimilated the political and international implications, which augured a growing dominance of the Anglo-Saxon powers both in the Atlantic and in at least western Europe, and probably a new postwar power balance not at all favorable to the fascist political model.

Thus a process of defastiscization began in August 1943, above all cosmetic but also implying certain political changes, as well. The propaganda line began to change, though Spanish news reporting would always remain relatively favorable to the Reich down to the end of the war. The ideological line of the FET also began to change. No more was heard of "the totalitarian state," and a completely new emphasis was placed on "humanism," with appropriate quotations from José Antonio. All the more fascistic points and phrases from the Twenty-Six Points would henceforth be passed over, with the limited exception of a few special party occasions. The new position, as Franco himself put it to the Allied ambassadors, was that the FET was not merely a fascist party but not even a political party at all. Rather, it was simply a sort of agency for social reforms, such as syndical organization and welfare. This was an unprecedented defascistization for a fascist-type party participating in power.

All this further added to the cognitive dissonance under which the FET operated. There had always been considerable contradiction in Falangism, even more than in most fascist movements, because of the attempt to incorporate Catholicism culturally and spiritually. This had become more accentuated in 1937, though downplayed among Falangists themselves between 1939 and 1941. The cognitive dissonance began to ease with the beginning of defascistization, which meant the increasing victory of traditionalist Catholicism in the regime's doctrines, and the progressive relinquishing of those fascist features that most clashed with it.

The FET was further downgraded when Franco undertook the metamorphosis of the regime in 1945, beginning its conversion into a Catholic and corporative monarchy. The party was left without a secretary general for several years, and Serrano Súñer, accepting the political obliteration of fascism, wrote privately to Franco that the party should simply be disbanded.

Franco, however, had no such intention. The FET, now known formally as the Movimiento Nacional, would continue to the end of the regime, setting a record for longevity for this kind of movement in official institutions. The only competitor would be Salazar's União Nacional; the latter was a more limited organization, in some ways more similar to Primo de Rivera's Unión Patriótica. Efforts at political mobilization declined sharply, however, and by 1958, when I first arrived in Madrid, the Movimiento had become an object of derision among many Spanish young people. Therefore, in the postfascist era, why did Franco not take the advice of his brother-in-law and dissolve the party?

The fundamental reason would seem to be that he considered a weak, artificial, and limited state party better than no state party at all. Franco was forever concerned to avoid the "error Primo de Rivera" and to maintain a system with institutions, structure, and some sort of doctrine. The Movimiento provided a basic cadre of supporters for institutional structure and civic mobilization, however narrow, and Franco judged that the regime would be gravely weakened without it. The Movimiento enjoyed a comeback of sorts between 1948 and 1957, regaining a regular secretary general and briefly holding slightly greater prominence. When, however, during his second tour as secretary, Arrese attempted to "constitutionalize" the Movimiento by codifying for it a special and permanent tutelary role in the state, Franco found that his own hands were tied by the evolution of his regime. The Church leaders protested most directly, and Franco canceled the project. The new government of 1957 moved in a different direction, introducing the Principles of the Movement, which completed ideological defascistization. The last special moment of the party veterans had passed, and the Movimiento subsequently played a role even more exclusively bureaucratic, finally being officially abolished in 1977, two years after the death of Franco.

With the greater freedom of the last years of the regime, there would occasionally appear a book with a title such as
¿Por qué no fue posible la Falange?
The answer was that circumstances simply did not permit a more influential or powerful party. Although the Falange never governed, it survived in one form or another much longer than any other fascist-type party and, as I suggested earlier, the second characteristic partly depended on the first. It should be kept in mind that fascist-type parties have generally been extremely unsuccessful organizations. Of the very many that have existed, only two really came to power.

Though several "fascistogenic" factors existed in Spain during the 1930s, most of the factors that encouraged fascism elsewhere were lacking. Ultimately, it was the weakness of Falangism that became its strength, such as that was, the radical environment of civil war giving it a momentum it could not have acquired in peacetime. Subsequently, its hope for greater influence lay not so much with Franco as with Hitler, whose decline and fall eliminated any such possibility.

For nearly forty years Francisco Franco was, for better or worse, the most dominant figure to have appeared in the history of Spain. None of the kings of earlier centuries wielded proportionately as much power or so drastically changed the course of the country. Every preceding ruler operated to a greater or lesser degree within established laws and traditions, while Franco led a victorious counterrevolution that, to a much greater extent, established its own rules. During his lifetime he was the most successful counterrevolutionary of the twentieth century and, in terms of the positive transformation of his country, the most successful dictator.

He has been the most extravagantly praised and the most scathingly condemned figure in all Spanish history. No other has garnered such extremes of both the positive and negative. In recent years, during the era of political correctness, Franco has received little but continued vilification. Of all the figures in Spanish history, in some respects he is the most difficult to evaluate.
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As in the case of many others, Franco's orientation in life was strongly influenced by his family background, which included a history of two centuries of service in the Spanish navy. Franco sought to follow in the same tradition, but restrictions in the naval academy left him the sole alternative of the Military Academy in Toledo, certainly a fateful change, for a career as naval officer would have been entirely different. His immediate family background was not a happy one, for his father (who reached the rank of admiral in naval administration) was politically radical, personally libertine, and anti-Catholic, the exact opposite of Franco's pious, dutiful, and conservative mother. After his father abandoned the family altogether to live with a mistress in Madrid, the young Franco identified thoroughly with his mother and her values, a moral and psychological formation intrinsic to the development of his mature identity.

As a very young and undersized youth, Franco was only an average student in the academy, but he took advantage of combat service in Morocco, beginning in 1912, to exhibit uncommon courage and leadership ability. Most of his experience was gained as commander of elite units, first of Moroccan Regulates and then of the newly founded Legion. In the Protectorate Franco was a combat leader off and on for twelve years, from 1914 to 1926, and this was fundamental to his personal and professional development. The Moroccan years taught him courage, stoicism, and endurance, the importance of firm, determined leadership and discipline, the art of command, and the role of prudence and sound organization. He developed strength of character, combined with a certain impassivity and a sometimes pronounced harshness. This was a colonial campaign, so that he gained no very sophisticated knowledge of modern warfare, but on the other hand he obtained much practical experience, as well as a stellar reputation. Franco won five merit citations and rapid promotion, also suffering one life-threatening battle wound; in 1926 he became the youngest peacetime brigadier, so far as is known, in any European army. Ever afterward, he would personally acknowledge the importance of the Moroccan years in his personal formation and destiny.
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From the very beginning he started to gain a reputation for austerity and self-discipline, and firmly eschewed the standard vices of young officers — women, liquor, gambling. He had a personally romantic streak, but women played little — usually no — part in his early years, until he finally married Carmen Polo, a very young woman of good family in Oviedo, in 1923. Though it had taken a long time, his choice of wives was as well calculated as his military moves, for he enjoyed a long, happy, and harmonious marriage, and the stability of his personal life was probably not unrelated to the increasingly dominant public role that he played. Moreover, his peacetime assignments in Madrid and in Zaragoza (where he was the first director of the new General Military Academy) gave him entree to the social elite and provided a new veneer of sophistication, limited though it may have been, to his personality.

A seeming paradox is that prior to 1936 he had not been a prototypical Spanish "political general." This is not to say that he had no political attitudes or values, though much later, after the numerous zigzags of his regime, it would become common to view him as a cynical opportunist who sought only to perpetuate his own power.

In fact, Franco's basic political attitudes and values seem to have changed little during the course of his long life. He was trained in military values and, more than merely a patriot, was a strong nationalist (as during his early years, the military probably figured as the only significant group of Spanish nationalists). His fundamental convictions were monarchist, and also basically authoritarian and hierarchical, opposed to parliamentary democracy, even though in 1931 he understood the need to accept the "evolution of the times." Franco was a traditionalist Roman Catholic — much more so than many in the military hierarchy — and believed in a traditionalist Catholic culture. His views on economics in considerable measure stemmed from those attitudes. Like most Spanish activists of his time, he was a "regenerationist" and looked to modern economic development, which he thought should be guided by a statist and nationalist, authoritarian policy, though these economic ideas may not have crystallized until the Civil War. He was also an imperialist who believed in a kind of national mission, once oriented toward the new world but in the twentieth century toward Morocco and northwest Africa. This last was the only basic part of his political credo that he had to abandon during his later years, which coincided with European decolonization.

Always suspicious of political liberalism, by the early 1930s he became convinced that Freemasonry was the driving subversive force in liberal politics, and that the consequence of its subversion of institutions was to open the door to Communism. Despite his paranoia concerning Masonry, however, Franco was not given to the kind of knee-jerk reactions typical of the Right radical minority in the army command, but in practical affairs demonstrated a more calm and pragmatic assessment.

Though he initially opposed what he saw as Primo de Rivera's "abandonismo" in Morocco, he became a supporter of the latter's dictatorship, a source of political inspiration and an alternative to the perceived weakness and fragmentation of parliamentary democracy. Yet he tried to be a political realist and did not by any overt act oppose the advent of the Second Republic. He judged Sanjurjo's revolt in 1932 to be ill advised and hopeless, and had nothing to do with it, coldly observing afterward that "General Sanjurjo has gained the right to die" — a typically mordant Franco commentary. His discipline and prudence were rewarded after the first big spin of the Republican political wheel, gaining him major promotion to major general once the center-Right assumed power. He was called in to coordinate repression of the Socialist revolutionary insurrection of 1934 and then made chief of the general staff the following year. It was characteristic of Franco that he became identified with the center and the moderate Right (much more the latter than the former), and refused to be involved in any of the conspiracies of the monarchist radical Right or the Falangists. When urged to take the initiative in military intervention as soon as it became clear that the Popular Front was winning the elections of February 1936, he refused to accept any responsibility, observing accurately that the military commanders were profoundly divided and could not assume responsibility on their own. Instead he urged the government to use its own authority and took personal initiative in trying to activate the decree of martial law that President Alcalá-Zamora gave the prime minister. Since the latter refused to use the decree, Franco's initiative was quickly canceled.