José Antonio Primo de Rivera

The Reality and Myth of a Spanish Fascist Leader

Joan Maria Thomàs

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202090
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Biografías políticas

There are few individuals in modern Spanish history that have been as thoroughly mythologized as José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a leading figure in the Spanish Civil War who was executed by the Republicans in 1936 and celebrated as a martyr following the victory of the Falangists. In this long-awaited translation, Joan Maria Thomàs provides a measured, exhaustively researched study of Primo de Rivera's personality, beliefs, and political activity. His biography shows us a man dedicated to the creation of a fascist political regime that he aspired to one day lead, while at the same carefully distinguishing his aims from those of the Falangists and the Franco Regime.

Chapter 1

José Antonio Primo de Rivera and His People

Fascism and the Desire to Exceed His Father

José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia (1903–1936) was known as José by his family and friends, and as José Antonio by his colleagues in the Fascist party he founded, the Falange Española. At the party’s inception, the members decided to copy Italy’s Partito Nazionale Facscista (National Fascist Party—PNF) and address one another informally in their internal dealings. This decision was quite revolutionary for 1930s Spain and aimed to show that at the heart of the organization was a desire to create a new political society that was at once anti-Democratic, anti-leftist, and anti-separatist but also anti-Conservative. The idea was to remove unequal social treatment within the party, which was quite a novelty, but not the internal chain of command, which was of the extremely inflexible paramilitary type and, of course, unequal. This was an unexpected combination in right-wing organizations in general but not in the extreme left wing. Also unexpected was the emergence of a Fascist party in Spain at the end of 1933.

Before this time, Fascism had only been present in the form of factions that managed to gather just a few hundred supporters. One was the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (Councils of the National Syndicalist Offensive—JONS), led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and Onésimo Redondo Ortega, who had previously founded two even smaller groups that the JONS subsequently subsumed: La Conquista del Estado (founded in February 1931), which also published a weekly magazine of the same name, and the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (Castilian Groups of Hispanic Action),¹ set up in August 1931. Although the latter group had experienced a slight increase in popularity, among university students in particular, in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and played an active part in such dramatic events as the attack on the Association of Friends of Russia and the robbery of its files, it was little more than a marginal group funded by anti-Republican Alfonsist monarchists who were interested in inciting as much of this sort of unrest as possible.

The Falange would be the most important of all the Fascist parties, even though it was marginal in terms of numbers until the spring of 1936. In this respect, it was quite unlike the Fascist parties of other European countries and simply incomparable with the Fascists in Italy and Germany, who had managed to seize power and create the only Fascist regimes in the world. One of the three initial leaders of the Falange, presented in public on 29 October 1933, was no less than the firstborn son of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, the Spanish dictator from 1923 to 1930. Like all Fascist parties, the Falange was founded with the ambition of “conquering the state”; ending democracy, left-wing revolutionary threats, and non-Spanish Nationalist movements (particularly in Catalonia and the Basque Country); and, of course, constructing a new Fascist state.

But what exactly did this involve? And what was the difference between the aims of Fascism and the political objectives of the right-wing parties when the Falange came into being? The right-wing forces—the extreme Comunión Tradicionalista (Traditionalist Communion) and Renovación Española (Spanish Renewal), and the somewhat more moderate Acción Popular (Popular Action), which was the backbone of the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights—CEDA)—all aspired to wipe out left-wing parties, end democracy (i.e., the Spanish Republic), and set up an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime in its place. Two of these groups’ members were monarchists: the Traditionalist Communion consisted of Carlists (supporters of the dissident Bourbon branch who opposed the dynasty of Isabella II), and the Spanish Renewal of Alfonsists (supporters of Isabella’s descendants, the last of whom had been Alfonso XIII). They had both been acting clandestinely to bring down the Republican regime and to this end had set up paramilitary militias: the Carlist Requetés and the Alfonsist militias. Of course, they also acted legally, taking part in elections and sending deputies to the Republican parliament.

However, the dynastic issue—the two branches of the House of Bourbon—was not the only point on which the two groups disagreed. Their models of monarchy were also quite distinct. The Carlists believed in absolutism: that a king had a divine right to the throne and that Spain should go back to the model of the Ancien Régime, with its class-based parliaments, guilds, and autonomous councils. For their part, the Alfonsists were fighting for an authoritarian monarchy, a strong government (dictatorial or semi-dictatorial), and the definitive withdrawal of the Constitution of 1876, which would mean the end of Liberalism. Because both groups rejected democracy and Liberalism, they managed to get along to a much greater extent than would have been possible just fifty years earlier, after the end of the third of the civil wars—the Carlist Wars—in which they had clashed.

Popular Action—the right-wing group with the most voters, deputies, and members—also clearly opposed the Republic and its constitution. It was a Catholic and confessional party, but unlike the other two parties, which sought the complete destruction of the Republican regime and thus deserve the label of extreme, it merely wanted the regime to be more authoritarian and to follow the social and political doctrine of the Catholic Church. It also advocated a different system of parliamentary representation: the parliament would have a new corporate house in which professions, families, and municipalities, among others, would be represented. Its idea of a republic, then, was quite different from the reforming, left-wing republic that had been created on 14 April 1931. Moreover, although the party was not officially monarchist, many of its leaders, members, and voters were. The fact was that Popular Action, which merged into the CEDA, hoped to fulfill its aims by means of a gradual, electoral strategy that involved accepting the Republican regime—something that the monarchist parties did not approve of at all.

Neither the extreme nor the more moderate right-wingers were Fascists, although the left-wing parties referred to them as such, and there were several fundamental differences between them and the Falange. First, the former were not Fascists, because they believed in the Catholic confessional state. The Falange, on the other hand, wanted a clear separation between the state and the Church even though Catholicism heavily influenced its ideology and political program. Second, two of the right-wing parties were explicitly monarchist. The Falange was not. It made no pronouncement on the form the regime would take, and, over time and through the statements made by its National Leader, it would disassociate itself from the monarchy. Third, the right-wing forces were Conservative—extremely Conservative. They defended the status quo and property at all levels and, with some slight exceptions in minority sections of the CEDA, opposed any form of structural social reforms. The Falange, however, aimed to make some nationalizations—in financial services (i.e., banking) and public services—and implement economic and social reforms, the most important of which was land reform.

All these policies were “anti-capitalist” approaches to financial, speculative, and usurious capitalism—in contrast to “legitimate” productive capitalism—and were, of course, compatible with private property, although not with the abuses perpetrated by owners against the less fortunate classes, who the Falange believed should be delivered from the misery in which they lived (referring specifically to landless peasants and day laborers). By no means did the Falange intend to bring about a left-wing revolution, but it did want to improve the country’s general standard of living and wipe out the enormous pockets of poverty. This Falangist-Fascist “revolution” was known as the “National Syndicalist” revolution and aimed to end the class struggle by uniting employers and workers in a new, enormous, vertical syndical structure, under the supervision of the Falange, within which everybody would have a role in working for social justice. So, the Falange, a Fascist party, was differentiated from the rest of the right-wing forces by its (relative) anti-Conservatism.

There was a fourth difference, which was quite subtle with respect to the far right-wing forces but somewhat less so with respect to the right-wing Popular Action and CEDA: violence and its use as a political weapon. In this respect, the difference between the Falange and the far right wing (which practiced violence) was almost nonexistent but was quite clear between the Falange and Popular Action. The Falange defended violence as a new form of political struggle in the street. José Antonio regarded this as necessary, humanitarian, crude, and chivalrous and surgical. This violence included “squadron” missions by the Falange militias to break up left-wing meetings, lay siege to their headquarters, cause confrontations in the streets, and so on. He argued that violence should be used against the left-wing forces because they would not hesitate to use violence against the Falange. The wave of violence led to deaths, injuries, assassination attempts, and, above all, the preparation of coups to “conquer the state” with forces of their own or with the assistance of the Army, which was also an aim of the far-right monarchist parties.

Fifth, the Falange was interested in attracting all the social classes, including peasants and workers, whether or not they had been members of left-wing political groups or syndicates. This desire to unify, or reunify, was fundamental to the Fascist ideology: if the Fascists were to combat the divisions in the political parties that had sprung out of Liberalism and democracy, and the looming shadow of an Asian Communist revolution that threatened to destroy Western civilization, then they had to reunify the whole of Spain in a project that would regenerate the country and make it great again. So, they aimed to unify, reunify, and form a fascio to end the artificial divisions invented by theorists of democracy (e.g., Rousseau), achieve “social justice” in opposition to the egocentric wealthy classes and the Communist revolutionaries, and lead the country in the quest for further imperial expansion, thus restoring past glories.

The ultimate objective of all this was for the country to reencounter its essence, its internal flair. At the time, it was in a state of convalescence, but it was still possible to make a full recovery—to fulfill the “unity of destiny” of the whole population, of all the regions that, when they had worked together, had made Spain a world power, the greatest nation of its time, the nation of Catholic kings and the first years of the House of Hapsburg rule with its European and colonial empire. Unity, however, had come up against the obstacle of the peripheral nationalisms of some regions, the result of the ailing “unity of destiny.” This obstacle had to be confronted and overcome by offering the inhabitants of these regions new projects and new missions that were Spanish in their conception. National issues were to be given priority, followed by imperial ones. This is what the Falange and its leader promised the country.

The Falange’s Fascist project, then, was quite different from other right-wing options of the time. This difference was partly because the Falange’s future National Leader, José Antonio, said the party was in neither the left nor the right wing. Indeed, he said it was not even a party but instead an “anti-party” or a “social movement.” In general, and with some specific national distinctions, this difference placed his organization and political thought on par with general European Fascism. When José Antonio said, as he did on occasion, he was not a Fascist, he was referring to the term of Italian origin and to the fact that he did not apply the Fascist doctrine as did Mussolini in Italy or Hitler in Germany; he applied it to the reality in Spain. He wrote: “Fascism is not just an Italian movement: it is a total, universal sense of life. Italy was the first to apply it. But is not the conception of the state as a permanent historic mission also valid outside Italy? . . . Who can say that only Italians aspire to such things?”² At other times, he pointed out differences with Nazism and the totalitarian state. This, however, does not mean he—or, after studying and analyzing his Falange ideology and practices, we—did not believe he was a Fascist, albeit with some slight nuances in his way of thinking (see chap. 4).

Of course, there were differences between the Falange’s Fascism and that of Germany, Italy, and other places in Europe. Racism was one of the most important distinguishing features of German Fascism, while the focus on the individual and Catholicism was a defining feature of Spanish Fascism. However, the similarities were far greater. For this reason, José Antonio, before he decided to launch his party, visited Mussolini in Rome and had an interview with Hitler and the leading Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg in Berlin.³ In his heart, he felt closer to Fascism than to Nazism, closer to the Italian than to the German. And although he never explicitly said so and sometimes denied it,⁴ he aspired to be a dictator like these two leaders. He never referred to the role his party would play in the new Fascist state that would have him at the head. He did, however, talk of the “natural entities”—the family, the municipality, the syndicate—as the pillars of a state he defined as Syndicalist, as opposed to capitalist or Socialist. This was quite consistent with his anti-political party stance, his anti-Democratism. But the fact that he did not refer to the existence of a single party or a social movement after succeeding to power does not mean he had not thought about it. Nevertheless, this lack of reference was subsequently exploited to cast doubts on his “Fascism.”

José Antonio’s ambition was to lead his party, restore national unity, and strive for imperial goals. He was convinced Spain, thanks to him and his Falange, would once again start to move in the same circles as the few nations in the world—like Italy, Germany, and England—with a national and imperial “unity of destiny.” Another ambition was for the population as a whole to accept the Falangist doctrine. Once the party succeeded to power, as tended to be the case in totalitarian states, the single ideology that governed it would spread to encompass society, family, and the world of empl...