The Politics of Revenge

Fascism and the Military in 20th-century Spain

Paul Preston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134811120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The role of the Spanish Right in the course of the twentieth-century has been a neglected area of academic study. The Politics of Revenge redresses this providing a succinct and disturbing account.

Part I

DEFENDING THE PAST

1
Resisting modernity: fascism and the military in twentieth-century Spain

In the summer of 1936 important sections of the officer corps of the Spanish army rose against the Second Republic. The officers involved were convinced that they were acting to save their country from the breakdown of law and order, the disintegration of national unity and waves of proletarian godlessness provoked by foreign agents. They believed themselves to be acting disinterestedly, inspired only by the highest patriotic values.¹ In fact, the military uprising, the consequent protracted war effort between 1936 and 1939 and the dictatorship which institutionalized the eventual victory of the rebels all shared a socially and politically partisan function. The function, if not the explicit intention, of the military rebels of 1936 and the military rulers of Spain after 1939 was, in addition to rooting out regionalism and reasserting the hegemony of institutionalized Catholicism, the protection of the interests of the agrarian-financial-industrial élites. In particular, that meant shielding the reactionary landed oligarchy from the challenge to Spain's antiquated economic structures embodied in the reforms of the Second Republic.

In 1936, for a number of complex reasons, the military uprising could count on a substantial amount of popular support that was, in the crudest terms, broadly equivalent to the combined electoral strengths of the major right-wing parties of the Second Republic.² That civilian support was consolidated in the course of the Spanish Civil War because of religious convictions reinforced by the Catholic Church's commitmentto Franco, fear fuelled by political terror, the geographical loyalty of those whose survival instincts dictated that they adhere to the Nationalist cause, the wartime intensification of passions and hatreds provoked by atrocities in both zones, and the victorious dictatorship’s capacity to disburse patronage andpreferment. This is not to say that the Franco dictatorship was as popular as its propagandists claimed but simply to recognize that it had an autonomous base of mass support and was not merely the instrument of an isolated clique of soldiers and plutocrats.³ The mechanism whereby the military mobilized and channelled that civilian backing was the sprawling umbrella organization of the right, the Movimiento or, more formally, the Falange Espanola Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, artificially created by the forced unification of the pro-Franco political parties in April 1937.⁴

The Unificación merely formalized the fact that the Franco regime was built upon a coalition of interlocking and overlapping forces, Falangists, Carlists, authoritarian Catholics and aristocratic monarchists. The Nationalist coalition was legitimized by the Catholic Church and dominated by its own praetorian guard. There would always be a certain rivalry for power between the component groups although the jostling was usually restrained, exploding into violence but rarely and then on the smallest scale. Inter-regime hostilities were kept within bounds by an awareness of the need to cling together against the recently defeated left. It is often said that General Franco’s supreme skill was the ability to manage in his own interests the competition between his supporters. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to imply that they were not willing collaborators in his political juggling act. After all, the Caudillo’s own position was never seriously threatened in thirty-eight years of dictatorial power.

The fact that Franco was so infrequently challenged reflected both the power of the army within the Spanish right and the care which he devoted to his own relationship with the military. Although it was ultimately to be diminished by its part in the dictatorship, the army maintained a privileged position, to an extent au dessous de la mêlée. Its only serious challengers for dominance of the Francoist establishment were to be found in the Falange and then only in the early years of the regime. It is not entirely surprising that the two most powerful instruments of Francoism, the civilian and the military, united under pressure duringthe Civil War and then again in the last days of the dictatorship, should be rivals in the interim. The tensions between them were to be most acute during the Second World War when the Falange perhaps appeared stronger than it really was, its ranks flooded by recent recruits from other parties and its influence inflated by the military successes of Hitler and by the machinations of the German embassy. ⁵ After 1945 its strength was slowly to wane. Throughout the war, however, theFalange was to be a raucous advocate of Spanish entry into the Second World War on the Axis side. Although there was no shortage of fascist army officers, many of the most senior generals, invariably Catholic and often monarchists, adopted a patrician tone and expressed contempt for Falangists as upstart riff-raff, Moreover, in contrast to the ideological zealots of the Falange, the high command was cautious, after the devastation of the Civil War, about making any commitment to the Axis, despite an admiration for German military prowess.

By 1943 the balance in the internal jostling for power was tipping against the Falange. While the army’s position remained as strong as ever, after the fall of Mussolini, the voice of the Falange was muted. In the aftermath of the Second World War the political pre-eminence of the Falange within the dictatorship was diminished by Franco. Anxious to clear himself of the stigma of his Axis and fascist connections, he began to look for senior political servants among the ranks of authoritarian Catholics.⁶ Nevertheless, the Falange still maintained an important presence in Franco’s cabinets. Outside of government it stood astride a substantial, and profitable, power base, controlling a huge national and provincial press chain and the state trade union system, as well as commanding insidious influence through its mass organizations, the Youth Front and the Feminine Section.⁷ Over the subsequent decades that influence was to decline inexorably, its fascist rhetoric rendered anachronistic by social and economic changes that were impelling Spain towards ultimate integration in a democratic Europe. Ironically, the military, despite its essentially stronger position was also to lose political relevance. That was to bethe price paid for acquiescing in professional decay under Franco in return for political privilege, for putting the defence of the dictatorship before the military defence of the nation.⁸ By the late 1950s Spain’s economic development was already such that a military dictatorship was demonstrably an obstacle to further growth. The military and the Falange were thus finally thrown together again, a rapprochement between them favoured by the fact that the upper ranks of the army were dominated from the 1960s onwards by Falangist sympathizers who had become provisional second-lieutenants, or alféreces provisionales,during the Civil War. No longer confident of’ the popular support which they had seemed to enjoy at the end of the Civil War, isolated generals and Falangists joined in a series of desperate ventures to destroy the democratic regime established after the death of Franco.⁹

The differences between the army officers of 1931–6 and those of 1973–81 are revealing of the enormous changes which had taken place on the Spanish right in the course of the Franco dictatorship. In the 1930s officers could convince themselves that they were the defenders of essential national values, the territorial integrity of Spain, the Catholic Church and landed property against Moscow-inspired threats. Moreover, in assuming the role of defenders of the ‘true Spain’, they could do so in the conviction of representing far from negligible sectors of society. When the uprising took place on 18 July 1936 the highly politicized, modern press networks of the right had been unreservedly behind them for months, if not years. That more or less guaranteed the mass support discernible in the electoral geography of the right under the Second Republic. The bulk of the church hierarchy gave them their blessing. Bankers and industrialists looked to them as saviours. Accordingly, the pride of senior army officers in the 1940s was not born solely of their military victory, but also of the unshakeable confidence that they were playing a hegemonic role in Spanish society with the endorsement of the church, the economic élites and large numbers of ordinary Spanish Catholics.

In contrast, many of the army officers of the final days of the Franco regime were entirely divorced from society. The church had withdrawn its support from the Franco regime in the late 1960s and put its weight behind the growing popular clamour for democracy. The most dynamic sectors of banking and industry were also betting on democratic change. After the death of Franco opinion polls and subsequent elections showedthat the hard-line Francoist right would never enjoy more than 3 per cent of popular support, and almost all of that concentrated in the two Castiles.¹⁰ Although the rhetoric of the military plotters of the late 1970s barely differed from that heard in the officers’ messes of the 1940s, still shot through with references to the Civil War and hatred of the left, it was uttered now not with pride but with resentment. The conspirators of 1936 could reasonably believe that they were saving Spain, not for all Spaniards, but certainly for those who mattered. In contrast, the rancorous golpistas of 1981, for all their arrogant swagger, were embittered that even the Spaniards who mattered were no longer interested in the values of the Civil War.

Transformations in the social structure and in the levels of economic development within Spain itself, together with political changes in the worldoutside, account for the dramatic evolution of the roles of both fascism and the military within the Francoist repertoire. In the murky political twilight of Franco’s senile decay, those changes had rendered obsolete the dictatorship, its Falangist apparatus and its military defences. Nevertheless, both Falangists and army officers bestirred themselves to defend their regime. Thereafter, the civilian and military extreme right, known collectively as the ‘bunker’, worked desperately to overturn the process of democratization. That some sectors of the army and the apparatus of the Movimiento should refuse to fade away along with their Caudillo or seek some rapprochement with the constitutional monarchy was the natural consequence of the role allotted to each by the dictatorship.

The relationship between fascism and the military in Spain was one which changed significantly in the course of the dictatorship, moving from the uneasy alliance of the Civil War years to something more symbiotic in the 1970s. In fact, the political pre-eminence of the army in taking the lead in the assault on the Second Republic and throughout the Franco dictatorship has been used to absolve Francoism of accusations that it was fascist. However, the co-operation of the Spanish army and the Falange during the Civil War and in the 1970s was far from being that of master and servant It was different from that between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party or that between the Italian army and the Fascist Party, in that the Spanish army held the upper hand, Yet, in all three cases, the fascist party and the army were important elements of a wider counter-revolutionary alliance. In each country, the balance of forces within that alliance was different, for reasons to do with the particular traditions of the armed forces, their recent history and thespecial national circumstances of the emergence of counter- revolutionary groups.

The Italian army was more subservient to the dictator than the Spanish. Nevertheless, the ambition of fascist leaders such as De Vecchi, Farinacci and Balbo to ‘fascistizzare’ the army was frustrated. The activities of the fascist militia were also restrained.¹¹ The process whereby Hitler passed from deference towards the German officer corps to a contemptuous domination thereof was a complex one, taking over five years to accomplish. However, although the circumstances were rather different and the consequences slower to materialize, the introduction of Nazi elements as part of the major expansion of the Wehrmacht had its Spanish parallel in the influx of alféreces provisionales during the Civil War.¹² Where there is to be found a substantial diflference is in the personality and political concerns of the leader of the counter-revolutionary alliance. Accordingly, the exercise of personal control over the military machine by both Mussolini and Hitler ensured that the Italian and German armies would not be restraining elements in the elaboration of foreign policy. Franco was, after all, a general himself andresponsive to the efforts of the high command to persuade him to resist the Axis temptation.¹³ In the Spanish, German and Italian cases, transactions and servitudes, mutual contempt and hidden resentments were present in the cooperation of patrician backers, army officers and fascist activists along with genuine enthusiasms.

In the field of fascist-military relations, exact scientific definitions are a chimera. One of the attractions of limiting the study of fascism in Spain to the Falange is that it neatly side-steps a number of thorny interpretative and ideological problems. If S...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Author’s Note
• Preface
• Chronology
• Part I: Defending the Past
• Part II: Surviving the Present
• Part III: Instruments of Dictatorship
• Part lV: Resurrecting the Past
• Further Reading