Franco's Fascists
IT is now almost twenty-six years since General Queipo de Llano declared, after seizing the city of Seville, that twenty-five years of military dictatorship might be necessary to restore order and discipline to the unhappy Spanish people. The Caudillo's recent and remarkable announce- ment that 'there is no dictatorship in Spain' has nothing to do with the expiration of the twenty- five-year sentence imposed by his defunct colleague. Franco has a useful knack of forget- ting every past commitment. As Chapter XI of the Falange's statutes makes abundantly clear, `The Jefe is responsible before God and before History'; he is not accountable to his own people. His latest impassioned remark, 'We love liberty more than any other country can love it,' is explicable enough to those who understand the context. The left is faced with a growing demand for political freedom from the students of his own party, the Falange; they are making common cause with young liberals and Socialists in placarding the universities at Madrid and Barcelona with the word 'Liberty.'
The great value of Stanley Payne's book on the Falange is that he explains the context for most of Franco's declarations of the last thirty years. For his analysis of the nature of Spanish fascism goes back to the days when Francisco Franco was the Chief of Staff of the Republican Army, and, incidentally, a republican. There was remarkably little in common between the tidy- minded, cautious but agile Galician general and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was not only an Andalusian grandee, son of the late dictator, but also founder of the Falange and, in tempera- ment, aptly described as 'the poetic lawyer.' Franco would have nothing to do with -Jose Antonio's conspiracies while he held office as Chief of Staff, and even after being 'exiled' to command the garrison at Teneriffe, he was care- ful not to commit himself.
The man responsible for the 'mystical marriage' between Francisco and Jose Antonio was that strange shadowy figure General Mola, who, had he lived, might have altered the course of history by restoring the Spanish monarchy. Mola was both impetuous and timorous. During the months of planning the insurrection he went through periods of despondency, when he feared that the Army would be unable to subdue the militant workers of Madrid. It was to break the workers' resistance from within that Mola called upon Jose Antonio's small Fascist party, the Falange. It was so small at the time that no one else took it seriously; it had polled fewer than 50,000 votes at the last general election. But it was composed of very young men, mostly from the better-off working class and the worse-off middle class; and it could be counted upon for political assassination. It was to the Falange that Mola was referring when he said that he had four columns marching on Madrid, and a 'fifth column' inside the city.
Franco, on the other hand, had no great faith in such teams of hot-headed youngsters. As soon as he reached Morocco from the Canaries and assumed command there, he made contact with Hider and Mussolini, seeking arms and transport. Without the Moroccan Army and its Nazi and Fascist contingents the generals' insurrection would have been crushed, and that would have been the last that was heard of the Falange. For by that time Jose Antonio had been executed in the Republican gaol at Alicante; and there was no surviving leader capable of expressing coherently the aims of the Falange. Franco succeeded by calculation where Mola would have failed. When he assumed undisputed control of the insurrection after Mola's death in a smash, he realised that he must have a political party to support him. And what party was more con- venient than the leaderless Falange? From a small group in the political wings, flirting on the one hand with the monarchists, on the other with the anarchists, the Falange became overnight the only lawful political party in Spain, and has remained so ever since.
Mr. Payne discloses—rather more by accident than by design—how Franco has been dogged by the ghost of Jose Antonio ever since. For, in truth, young Primo de Rivera was a man of ideas, and by no means all of them were bad. He was a frustrated anglophile trying to introduce the Kiplingesque concept of 'my country right or wrong'—he used to recite 'If' to himself daily— to an undereducated, underfed people, disparate in their regional and political loyalties. Indalacio Prieto, the leading Spanish Socialist, looking through the diaries of the man whose execution he had sanctioned, found in them much with which he agreed. And Prieto, after Franco had triumphed, was responsible for publishing Jose Antonio's Last Testament in an endeavour to embarrass the Caudillo; for Kipling wrote not only 'If' but also `Runnymede'—an ode to Magna Carta.
Provided that he does not rely on the inda, the reader of Mr. Payne's book can find all the information he needs about Spanish fascism. The author's painstaking collection of facts is quite admirable, but as with many American scholars he has dug so deep down into the roots that one feels he has not quite reached surface—and day' light—by the end of the book. All the same we must be very grateful to him for an important and original piece of research.
PETER BENENSON
Previous page
