by David J. Lobina
‘…a los gritos de «¡Viva España!» «¡Viva La Legión!» muere a nuestros pies lo más florido de nuestra compañías…’ —Franco, Diario de una Bandera [i]
In these times in which the term ‘fascism’ is forever abused, especially in the English-speaking world, and more specifically in the US, where large swathes of the liberal intelligentsia have convinced themselves that they are living through actual fascism,[ii] it is perhaps inevitable for the hispanist historian Paul Preston to be asked, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Francisco Franco’s death, why he is not so keen to call Franco a fascist (and, by extension, Francoist Spain a fascist state). And a historian’s answer he provides (not my own translation, because I am lazy, though I have edited it; my emphasis):
The use of the word “fascist” is a problem for me. If you ask me what a fascist is, I would say that the clearest example is Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. Everything else is different. The problem with the word is that it is used as an insult. Today we say that Trump is a fascist. But of course, I am a university professor, and when I was at Queen Mary, University of London, I taught a course on the nature of fascism where I always asked to what extent Nazism was a case of fascism, because the problem is that it is something much worse. And Francoism, in many ways, was also worse.
Furthermore, [Italian] fascism had a rhetoric of doing away with everything old, something that Franco did not have, as he supported large landowners and the aristocracy. The part about the violence, which many associate with fascism, comes in Franco’s case from being a colonialist military man, an Africanist. Without Africa, I don’t understand myself, he said. Just like the Belgian or British military of the time. That’s why I’m uncomfortable using the word fascist with Franco.
This is par the course for a historian, as I have stressed many times before at 3QD (see, for instance, this piece) – most historians of Fascism, Nazism or Francoism have always kept them quite apart conceptually, despite some prima facie clear commonalities, which seem to me to be overemphasised in general anyway.[iii] But no more of this argumentative line now.
More to the point of this series, and as the Preston’s quote alludes to, it is Franco’s experiences in North Africa that explain a great deal of both his own outlook and that of the milieu he surrounded himself with – and this is a better foundation to understand Francoism than any analogies to Italian Fascism, let alone Nazism. The world I described in part I, based on Franco’s own diary of his time as a leader of the Spanish Legion in Morocco, is one of extreme violence, of the dehumanisation of the enemy, of unspeakable punishments to both the enemy and one’s own troops, of unbounded cruelty and even revelling on one’s atrocities, of no quarter given whatsoever. It is a world in which military honour and death – certainly not life – are celebrated and even glorified, as the quote heading this post indicates; or as José Millán-Astray, the founder of the Spanish Legion, once infamously put it: ¡Viva La Muerte! (Long Live Death). And considering that the 1936 coup to overthrow the Spanish Republic was initiated by Franco and other Africanist generals, the consequent 3-year-long civil war could not be but a story of atrocities (see here, for background).
But it is the post-war period that I want to focus on here. So, what did Franco do after winning the war, then? As mentioned in part I, Nicolás Sesma’s recent book, Ni Una Ni Grande Ni Libre (Neither One Nor Great Nor Free), is a good guide to outline the post-war Spanish world (minus the insistence to link Francoism to fascism in every other page).
The first noteworthy issue I want to draw attention to from the book is the nature of the offence the Spanish Republic posed to Franco and others – as they saw it, of course.
In February 1939, with the civil war won, Franco’s side passed the Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas (LRP; Law of Political Responsibilities), a repressive piece of legislation with the aim to punish those Franco and others viewed as traitors to Spain. Nothing new under the sun in this respect: even though it was Franco and company who staged a coup d’état, by the end of the war they set it all up so that they presented themselves as saviours of the nation, having been forced to act to save the country.
Interestingly, the law backdated the beginning of ‘all subversion of law and order’ – the excuse the nationalists (so-called during the war) used to justify the coup – to October 1934, during the so-called Revolution of 1934, an uprising and general strike that mostly took place in Catalonia (where a Catalan state was declared, lasting one day) and Asturias (in the north of Spain). The uprising was eventually put down and some 2000 people died, many of these executed, with Franco having participated in this suppression, though not directly. This was a full two years before the coup and the beginning of the civil war, and 5 before the end of the war; but no matter, the coming repression would include anyone who may have had something do with the events in October 1934 – the beginning of all ills, it seems.
A second noteworthy aspect worth highlighting from Sesma’s book is the nature of the enemy that Francoism identified. Despite Franco’s obsession with a Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, and despite the fact, moreover, that there were no significant numbers of either Jews or Freemasons in Spain in 1936, the main enemy was in fact identified in terms of political militancy. Race or ethnic group were not relevant in 1930s Spain, but anyone whose politics did not align with the ultra-nationalist, conservative, and Catholic mix that was to dominate Spanish life for 40 years would be branded and regarded as an enemy. And in effect this meant anyone with anything to do with left politics, especially anything that might question the strict hierarchy military men (for it was men) see as entirely natural and a fact of life both in the military and in any society – Spain as a country of masters and slaves, as an aristocrat notoriously put it at the time (here, referenced to above already).
And the final noteworthy factor I want to highlight from Sesma’s book is the nature of the punishment meted out by the Francoist state on their perceived enemies. Manual Azaña, the last president of the Spanish Republic (1936-39) could not have been more wrong when he envisioned a need for clemency and forgiveness to secure a lasting peace once the civil war; the aim should not be to exterminate your adversary, he wrote once the LRP was passed – but that was precisely what the nationalists had in store for their adversaries, for there was not to be another Abrazo de Vergara, as they put it.
Just consider the sheer numbers of the dead for a start: around 130-140,000 people were killed for political reasons by the regime, 50,000 of these just in the 1939-48 period; around 200,000 people died of hunger in Spain in the 1940s; and starting from 1940, the regime put together a welfare programme (Auxilio Social) to cater for the children of the executed, with 20,000 of such children either in especially-built prisons or under the guardianship of the state by 1943. And then consider the charges against their adversaries: the LRP did not incorporate a presumption of innocence, but the very opposite (the charged was a “presente culpable”), with charges as serious as “military rebellion”; and not only were those who faced such charges usually executed, many other punishments (financial sanctions, seizing of properties) were inherited by the families, with significant stigma attached.
The LRP was meant to cleanse the state of Franco’s enemies, and it was one tool among many others, all these together the result of a totalitarian impetus which was particularly strong in the 1940s. Thus, in 1938 the nationalists founded the Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (now the General Archive of the Spanish Civil War) with the objective to gather information on political actors who were opposed to the coup, whilst in 1940 the Tribunal Especial para la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo (Special Tribunal for the Repression of Masonry and Communism) was set up to prosecute heterodox behaviours or beliefs, as clearly stated in its first article. Add to this the already-existing General Directorate of Security, in charge of keeping public order, soon to be the most notorious arm of Francoist repression, and the Spanish Africanist mindset was being translated to the structure of the state.[iv]
*****
It is a surprising fact that Franco’s Spain managed to escape the fate of other far-right European states from the 1920-40s, though the years 1943-47 is considered a critical period for Franco’s government. It passed, and part of its success afterwards was certainly due, in part, to the flexibility of the regime to adapt to changing international conditions, not least by riding the anti-communist wave efficiently. Later developments are harder to explain.
A year after Franco’s death in 1975, his only child created the Francisco Franco National Foundation, a charitable trust set up to disseminate Franco’s life and thought, unsurprisingly often with a revisionist bent – the 1936 coup d’état is typically referred to as an armed referendum, for instance. A crude propagandistic enterprise, it is only now in 2025 that the government of Spain has been able to get things moving to strip the foundation of its status, and thanks to a recent piece of legislation which outlaws the apologia of Francoism.
This is of course unthinkable in Germany (but not quite so in Italy), so why the anomaly? Well, this is not the most notorious issue when it comes to dealing with the legacy of Francoism. Once the regime was all but done by 1976 and an Amnesty Law was passed in 1977 so there would be no prospect to judge any of its many crimes, there was a long wait until 2007, when a Ley de Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory Law) was finally passed. Though of rather limited scope, it did however condemn the Francoist state, outlawed the worst cases of apologia of the regime, and established some provisions for victims.
Still, the legislation did not set up any truth commissions, as has been the case in many other countries, and it certainly did not sort out the greatest injustice, to my lights, in post-Franco Spain – the one aspect of Franco’s legacy that truly endures.
This is the fact that there are around 140,000 disappeared dead in Spain, all of them executed either during the civil war or during the dictatorship by the nationalists, most buried in unmarked graves, and to this day there is no national programme in Spain to identify the graves, exhume the remains, and bring some solace to families with a proper burial.
The 2007 Historical Memory Law did not provide for the exhumation of mass graves, though it did permit local administrations and private entities to undertake this work if possible. The law was recently superseded by the 2022 Ley de Memoria Democrática (Democratic Memory Law), which allows for the abolition of trusts such as the Francisco Franco Foundation and determines that searching for the disappeared falls under the purview of public administrations. What this means in effect is that whether this happens or not depends on the political outlook of local governments (those where right-wing parties rule don’t want anything to do with it) but in the end there is no official, comprehensive investigation on the matter, and this is grave failing for a modern state.
Over 140,000 disappeared dead is a pretty dire legacy for anyone, and a terrible burden for victims to bear, but it does befit Franco’s overall outlook in life pretty well.[v]
[i] Roughly: ‘to cries of “Long live Spain! Long live the Legion!” do the finest of our companies die at our feet’, a general sentiment that is repeated frequently in Franco’s Diario.
[ii] Even the otherwise sane Brian Leiter overplays the fascism analogy these days, often to ridiculous extents (sample). I certainly don’t envy future scholars trying to make sense of the nonsense.
[iii] In a previous post, I mentioned the work of Renzo De Felice, who used to emphasise the revolutionary pretentions of Fascism, for instance (especially the dream of creating a new Italy and new Italians), and he never regarded Francoism, conservative and ultra-Catholic as the regime always was, as being a species of Fascism in any way.
[iv] In his book, Sesma stresses the analogies between some of the state structures set up in Italy and Germany in the 1920-30s and those Franco established in Spain in the 1930-40s, some of which I have just described, and whilst Francoism was obviously influenced by Italian Fascism and Nazism, the differences are more pronounced than the similarities. As mentioned, traditional Spanish conservatism and a kind of ultra Catholicism were central to Francoism in a way that neither were central at all to Italian Fascism or Nazism, other than as political expediency for the most part. In addition, Francoism was a military movement that was closer in nature to prior military rule in Spain than it was to the militia-parties of Fascism or Nazism (as discussed in Part I, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of 1923-30 was often the guiding light for Franco and his inner circle). Indeed, Fascism and Nazism seized power from within and then dismantled/reorganised the state, whilst Francoism came onto the scene with far more violence under its belt as the result of an actual war, which is an important differentiator. In this sense, it is quite spurious to claim, as Sesma repeatedly does in the book, that the internal repression in Spain was far worse than in Italy or Germany in terms of political enemies killed, on account of the war factor (the different timelines are also relevant). Sesma is equally wrong to claim that Franco gained power while Mussolini and Hitler were given it, which is a bizarre reading of actual historical events.
[v] Needless to say, some of the revisionism of Franco’s figure in the US, now and then, is beyond the pale, but this is not the place to discuss this issue.
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