Stanley G. Payne

Franco vs. Fascism, January 26, 2007

Primo de Rivera is the great fascist leader of the Spanish Civil War. Captured, judged and sentenced to death by the Republicans in 1936, Franco shrewdly turned him into a martyr for his rebellion. Franco, however, was really only a pragmatic arch-traditionalist. In fact, many thought (or hoped) that, at the conclusion of the Second World War, Spain would fall into another civil war, this time between fascists and traditionalists. Of course, this never show more happened. But why? Brilliantly, during WWII, Franco sent traditionalist students to the seminary and young fascists to die with the Germans on the eastern front fighting the Soviet Union. Speaking of the Spanish troops fighting in the USSR Payne says, "Here disappointed Falangists could once more shoulder arms against atheistic Bolshevism [...] By no means all members of the Blue Division were enthusiastic Falangists, but a great many of them were [...] and scores of promising young Falange leaders never returned to Spain." (p. 233-234) Thus at the end of WWII there weren't enough Spanish fascists (or, at any rate, fascist leaders) left alive to oppose Franco!

The neutrality of Franco during WWII can also, I think, be nicely explained by his traditionalism. All the contending ideologies (i.e., communism, fascism, nazism, and, to a lesser extent, liberalism) in the Europe of the thirties (and WWII) were self-consciously trying to create a new world. Even in America one had the New Deal. But Franco I think fundamentally wanted to go back; it was of the Reconquista and the Church that he dreamed. Thus the refusal of the alliance with Hitler wasn't merely the result of some shrewd Machiavellian balance of power assessment. (Though it was, of course, in part that.) It was a genuine reflection of Franco's world view. All the contending powers in Europe wanted to go forward - Franco wanted to go back! See the first paragraph of chapter XVII (p. 239) where the author speaks of the change in 1943 and the Spanish insistence on peace with the Anglo-Saxon powers and war on Japan based on Christian principles(!) if there was to be a Spanish-Nazi alliance. Note that Franco also refuses to hand over Jewish refugees on Spanish territory to the Gestapo saying repatriation of refugees could wait until the end of the war. In effect, this of course meant that in order to get his hands on Jews in Spanish territory all Hitler had to do was conquer the world!

Now, were the Nazis, on their part, aware of this disconnect between their Ideology and Franco's traditionalism? This passage in a book by David Irving nicely catches the ideological distance between the Nazis and Franco in the pre-WWII period: "Early in November 1937 Hitler told his staff that an outright Franco victory in Spain was not desirable: `Our interest is in maintaining existing tensions in the Mediterranean.' That Franco was fighting the Communist-backed Republicans was of only secondary importance. In April 1938 Hitler would muse out loud to Reinhard Spitzy, Ribbentrop's private secretary: `We have backed the wrong horse in Spain. We would have done better to back the Republicans. They represent the people. We could always have converted these socialists into good National Socialists later. The people around Franco are all reactionary clerics, aristocrats, and moneybags - they've nothing in common with us Nazis at all!'" (Irving, "Hitler's War", p. 60-61) Of course, Hitler was only kidding himself if he actually thought the Spanish Republicans could be converted to Nazism. From a much later period, Goebbels, in his diaries, writes, "Tokyo is denying most energetically that atrocities have been committed against Spanish citizens in the Philippines as the Spaniards maintain." ("Final Entries", p. 220, March 24, 1945.) "The Spaniards have made a further sharp protest in Japan. The British maintain that the Spaniards intend to sever diplomatic relations with Japan." (March 25, 1945). The state of the war at this time (1945) I think speaks loudly for Franco's shrewdness, although his 'Machiavellianism' can be overdone if it is thought to be the overwhelming character of his regime.

From beginning to end there was a gulf between Franco's Spain and Nazi Germany that has been all too often papered over. Franco was a sincere traditionalist who understood the grave limitations to Spanish power. The mausoleum that Franco built to honor Primo de Rivera was a stone rolled over his grave to prevent fascism from rising again. This shrewdness allowed his rule to outlast those of Hitler and Mussolini by thirty years. show less

It's a bit difficult to evaluate the impacts of the Spanish Civil War from a 21st century perspective because the two contending sides--totalitarian socialism/communism and totalitarian fascism--mostly do not exist in today's political geography. Started as a socialist/communist revolt against a repressive monarchy with a limited parliament (1934-36), the civil war then entered a new phase (1936-39) when the right-leaning (eventually Fascist) military staged a counter-revolution and all-out show more war of attrition. The war would eventually bring in military and economic assistance from the Soviet Union on the Republican or "Loyalist" side and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on the Nationalist side. The Republican side enjoyed better press at the time and in the decades that followed because of the building and then world-shaking war against Fascism (two examples include Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and a brief reference to the war in the movie "Casablanca"). However, this book makes pretty clear that a lot of terrible acts, ranging from theft to mass murder, were performed by both sides. [Minor spoiler if you're not familiar with the history:] The Fascist side under Generalissimo Francisco Franco eventually won in 1939 and went on to rule Spain until 1975. Under the new realities of the Cold War, Franco began the slow process of liberalizing the Spanish economy and turning the back into a monarchy. Spain didn't have a formal constitution or traditional Western-style parliament until after Franco's death.

This was a conflict I knew very little about, so it was good to get the knowledge. However, one problem with the organization of the book is that it covers the civil war by topic (political, military, economic) rather than discussing the conflict chronologically. As a result, events are repeated, and it can be difficult to piece things together as a whole. Still, given the high-blown rhetoric occurring in the current U.S. election cycle, I thought it worth reading about this intense left-right conflict that happened not so long ago. One would hope it never gets so bad here. show less

2371 The Spanish Revolution, by Stanley G. Payne (read 24 Mar 1991) This 1970 book is described as a study of the social and political tensions that culminated in the Civil War in Spain. As far as I am concerned, Payne takes the correct view of the war. In fact, his conclusion is almost unanswerable: if Franco had not won the course of events in Spain would have been like the events in eastern Europe after World War II and Spain would have been a Communist country. There is no doubt that the show more right lost the 1936 elections in Spain, but there is good reason to believe that if the left had lost they would also have plunged Spain into civil war. And there can be little doubt that the Communists were increasingly running the "loyalist" side during the Civil War. This was a good book and has the right view of the Civil War. show less

This is an important work for understanding one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century. In an age which seems to want to make so many of the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s again it is important to understand just what those were and why, as Bertolt Brecht so ably put it, "the bitch that bore him is in heat again".