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Franco, the Spanish Falange and the
Institutionalisation of Mission
Stanley G. Payne
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Institutionalisation of Mission, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7:2, 191-201
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Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,
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ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/06/020191-11 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14690760600642206
Franco, the Spanish Falange and the Institutionalisation
of Mission
STANLEY G. PAYNE
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Taylor and Francis Ltd FTMP_A_164199.sgm 10.1080/14690760600642206 Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1469-0764 (print)/1743-9647 (online) Original Article 2006 Taylor & Francis 72000000June 2006 StanleyPayne sgpayne@wisc.edu
The original fascist movement in Spain never enjoyed very effective leadership,
even though its chief became the object of a major charismatic cult after his
violent, premature death. Despite this weakness, after it had been subsumed
within the Franco regime, Falangism became the longest-lived of all fascist-type
movements.
1
The Franco regime, in turn, was one of the longest non-communist
authoritarian regimes, and also the most successful, judged not simply in terms of
its longevity but also in terms of factors such as ultimate economic development.
Leadership was clearly a major factor in its longevity and success, though the
role of charisma in that leadership was complex and difficult to assess. Franco
was never a classic charismatic leader of the Mussolini type, but he and the
Falange did come to embody an important sense of the mission to define a new
role for Spain in the world.
Jos Antonio and Early Spanish Fascism
The founder of Spanish fascism, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, was unable to lead it
because of his lack of personality traits normally associated with leadership. A
philosophical essayist and low-level civil servant, Ledesma was purely an intel-
lectual, with minimal social contacts and no political background or experience.
Only 25-years of age when he entered the world of politics in 1930, he faced a
massive challenge, above all because, as I have analysed elsewhere, there was less
opportunity for a fascist movement in Spain than in a number of other European
countries.
Of average height and physical appearance, Ledesma had little gift for
personal relations and lacked financial resources. He was considered harsh and
doctrinaire, was slightly hard of hearing and without oratorical ability, the
latter compounded by a slight speech defect which prevented him from
pronouncing properly the Spanish r. He was not deficient in written propa-
ganda, and thus, in addition to providing most of the original doctrines of the
movement, he also coined most of its basic slogans, some of which were used
for years. Given this combination of ability and profound limitations, Ledesma
was able to function only as an ideological precursor: he could never develop or
lead a mass movement.
2
Correspondence Address: Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison 3211 Mosse
Humanities Building, 455 N Park St, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: sgpayne@wisc.edu
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192 S. G. Payne
The leader would be, of course, Jos Antonio the only public figure of modern
Spain known primarily by his first names. Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera will
always present something of a historiographical problem. A national cult figure
under the Franco regime for many years after his death, the amount of published
literature about him became immense, and has never ceased, for admirers
continue to bring out new books even in the twenty-first century. Yet in this
mountain of literature there will be found only one serious biography.
3
The problematic character of Jos Antonios leadership has to do with his
personality, his political ambivalence, his doctrines and ideas, his role within the
myriad political forces of Spain, and finally his relationship to the Spanish Civil
War and the Franco regime. Though Jos Antonios personal charm and sincerity
won him many friends and admirers during his lifetime, many colleagues and
more distant observers commented on the incongruous and contradictory aspects
of his career. Whilst not a truly great public speaker, he was capable of more than
a little eloquence and enjoyed a degree of literary talent. He did exert a certain
winsome a charisma at least of a sort that attracted young followers, yet he
seemed almost the opposite of the fascist type (normally understood as harsh,
authoritarian, sectarian, fanatical, and prone to violence). Some commented that
he seemed more cut out for liberal parliamentary politics than for fascistic street
demagogy.
In the case of Jos Antonio, family, rather than personality, was destiny. It is
very doubtful that his life would have ever followed the course that it did were it
not for his fathers earlier role as dictator of Spain from 1923 to 1930, and for the
bankruptcy and failure of his fathers regime. Amid the growing conflict and
polarisation of the Second Republic, Jos Antonio developed an overwhelming
sense of hereditary political responsibility to take up his fathers burden and
complete the latters attempt to transform Spain through authoritarian and
nationalist means. Whereas the senior Primo de Rivera had never developed an
effective ideology and programme, by 1933 Jos Antonio believed that the appro-
priate formula had become available through applying what he understood to be
the programme and strategy of Italian Fascism to Spain. In retrospect, this
appears naive, and yet Jos Antonio was a man of superior intelligence, with a
better education and broader personal culture than the majority of those active in
Spanish politics at that time. He did not understand fascism as clearly as did, for
example, Ramiro Ledesma, but was captive to the myth of Mussolini, whom he
seems to have identified with an idealised version of his father. Moreover, his
fathers own benevolent if authoritarian family relationship, and the relative calm
and absence of violence under the dictatorship, led him to assume that an author-
itarian nationalism of the fascist sort might be established in Spain with only the
most limited violence.
By autumn 1934 Jos Antonios personal qualities (a more commanding physi-
cal presence, charm, and a capacity for public speaking), combined with his more
extensive political and financial contacts, had enabled him to become Jefe Nacional
of a movement based largely on Italian Fascism. However, the enterprise was
proving to be a political failure. By the middle of the following year, this clear-cut
failure was leading the Falange to abandon the political tactics that had led the
Fascist and National Socialist movements to power, turning instead to the kind of
insurrectionary tactics attempted on four different occasions by Spanish anar-
chists and Socialists during 1932-34. All the leftist attempts at insurrection had
failed, even though each went further than Hitlers Bierhallputsch, and the Falange
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Franco and the Institutionalisation of Mission 193
proved to be so weak that it had to abandon plans to initiate such action. By
March 1936 the movement was simply outlawed by a republican government that
was in transition to its own ad hoc authoritarianism, and did not hesitate to take
the kind of action used against fascist movements by the Horthy, Carolist, and
Salazar regimes. Though as a clandestine organisation the Party finally began to
gain membership rapidly during the climactic Spanish crisis, as a regular political
force it had failed completely. The Falange had to rely on the initiative and leader-
ship of military forces to carry out the insurrection which would provide its only
chance of survival. Even before the death of Jos Antonio, the movement had
been forced to surrender its full autonomy. Independence once lost would never
be regained.
The long-standing myth of Jos Antonio is based above all on the concept of
martyrdom the messianic leader sacrificed by the enmity of rivals and enemies.
Certainly the death cult of Jos Antonio during the generation after the Civil War,
which began with a 500-kilometre funeral procession in which his coffin was
borne by hand from Alicante to San Lorenzo de El Escorial (the pantheon of
Spanish kings), where it was interred in front of the high altar, was almost unpar-
alleled. Reaching extremes never witnessed in the modern history of western
Europe, it was rivalled only by the Lenin cult in the Soviet Union.
His actual political leadership had left a great deal to be desired. Jos Antonios
career revealed inadequate analysis of key aspects of the Spanish political situa-
tion, combined with ideological uncertainty and ambivalence. Jos Antonio also
encountered considerable difficulty in the leadership and structuring of his move-
ment, partly because of the small number and uncertain quality of his followers.
He showed an inability to form effective linkages and alliances that might have
allowed the movement to grow, and at the end embraced a desperate Flucht nach
vorn into a completely uncertain insurrection which had virtually apocalyptic
consequences. His small band of followers did indeed respond to a kind of
charisma, but the scope of that charisma was so limited that Jos Antonio does not
bear comparison with major charismatic figures.
A sceptic might respond that such issues are rather beside the point, since
fascism simply had little possibility of developing as a political force in Spain, for
reasons which I have analysed elsewhere.
4
These objective circumstances would
doubtless have severely constrained the most expert leadership. Jos Antonio
originally seems to have reasoned by comparison with Italy and therefore failed
to come to grips with the limited appeal of nationalism in Spain. In this regard he
overestimated the extent of secularisation in the Spanish middle classes and
underestimated the force of political Catholicism. The latter had been officially
almost non-existent before 1933 but then developed rapidly, occupying most of
the space in the middle-class reaction against the left. This gave Spanish national-
ism a much more rightist and counterrevolutionary cast. Similarly, by compari-
son with all the countries in which fascism developed, the Spanish working class
proved impervious to the fascist appeal to nationalistic worker revolutionism.
There was some sense among second-rank Falangist leaders that his political
style was initially lacking in assertiveness and aggressiveness. Certainly during
the first year of the Falange Jos Antonio had difficulty coming to terms with the
degree of violence involved in radical fascist politics and more particularly, in
the peculiarly aggressive Spanish case, the degree of leftist anti-fascist violence
while the weakness of the movement rendered problematic its own employment
of violence. And certainly he was also guilty of the common Spanish political
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194 S. G. Payne
vices of amiguismo (cronyism) and nepotism, relying on personal friends and rela-
tives in the subordinate leadership of the movement. Yet it must also be asked
whether or not more able figures in fact existed to take their places. Left to his
own devices, he might have prudently accepted the rightist alliances offer of a
single safe seat (for himself) on the rightist electoral ticket in 1936, an offer which
in the long run might have saved his life. Other Party leaders opposed so limited
a deal, leading to the Falanges isolated candidacy and resulting parliamentary
annihilation. The rightist offer was in fact perfectly realistic; if it had been
accepted, Jos Antonio would have continued to enjoy parliamentary immunity.
Given the absence of constitutional guarantees under the subsequent Popular
Front government, it is hard to know for sure how helpful this would have been,
but it might well have spared him imprisonment and eventual execution, provid-
ing the opportunity for his continued leadership of the movement after the Civil
War began.
The final enigma in the ambivalent career of this contradictory figure concerns
the extent to which he may have altered his political ideas during the final months
of his imprisonment amid conditions of revolutionary civil war. The evidence
once more is ambiguous.
5
He made a presumably sincere offer to try to mediate a
cessation of the conflict, though it was a conflict which he had earlier helped to
unleash. He originally had no idea of its potential scope and destructiveness,
which soon horrified him. Finally, it must be remembered that he was executed at
the age of 33 the nominal age of Jesus Christ, as well as of Alexander the Great
and, later, of Evita Pern all of which formed part of the myth-cult. Because of
that, however, his political ideas remained to some extent in flux and, had he
lived, there is no reason to think that they might not have continued to change. In
his final memoranda, he was already referring to fascism as a distant and alien
force.
The execution and/or enemy imprisonment of most of the top Falangist leaders
during the first phase of the Civil War decapitated the movement to a degree at
least equivalent to that of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael two
years later. Though the latter never regained leadership equivalent to the charis-
matic Corneliu Codreanu, by 1938, it had already become a much larger, more
established movement than was the Falange at the start of the Spanish conflict.
Not only did the Falange have no other leader of the relative ability and author-
ity of Jos Antonio, but its remaining provincial chieftains were severely divided,
awaiting the return of el Ausente. Thus they made little effort to replace Jos
Antonio until it was literally too late, leaving the greatly expanded movement of
the Civil War years virtually acephalous as Francos new government prepared
somewhat slowly, as was typical of Franco to seize direct control of it.
6
Franco and the New Spain
In April 1937 Franco became the permanent new Jefe Nacional of the Party, its
second leader and the only other one that would exist until its eventual dissolu-
tion exactly 40 years later, soon after Francos own death. Franco himself was not
a charismatic fascist leader, above all because he was never a fascist sensu strictu.
His authority over the party stemmed from exogenous sources, as Chief of State
of the new regime founded by the military as well as supreme Generalissimo of its
armed forces. His arrogation of command over the Falange was merely a second-
ary extension of his primary powers.
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Franco and the Institutionalisation of Mission 195
If Franco was not a charismatic fascist leader, he was undeniably an effective
leader of his regime, as evidenced by the fact that he eventually died in bed at an
advanced age, his political authority little diminished. Francos own political
beliefs were typical of those of many right radical authoritarian regimes of the
interwar period. He was a strong nationalist, believed in undivided authoritarian
rule, traditional Catholic religion and culture, an economy based on private prop-
erty but highly regulated and controlled by a system of state corporatism, and the
imperative justice of empire as exercised by superior peoples.
7
One feature of his
thought that was similar to the development of Jos Antonios was the influence
of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, Francos first and primary experience with an
authoritarian nationalist regime. This seems to have had a major impact on his
thinking, and he endorsed most of its basic concepts and values, even as he
grasped its basic inadequacies. Becoming a more successful dictator than Primo
de Rivera and avoiding his mistakes would be a fundamental concern for Franco
after becoming head of state.
Of course, Franco of course first gained fame and prestige as an army officer,
becoming the youngest new brigadier general in Europe in 1926. This was a status
objectively achieved through a traditional form of legitimacy, although in an era
of increasing media coverage it also involved a significant dimension of publicity
and public relations. The Spanish army had long been known for political gener-
als, but Franco was not among them, becoming the most decorated and rapidly
promoted young officer in service as a result of his battlefield exploits. Though he
was known to be a right-wing monarchist, his professionalism and respect for
discipline and authority were proverbial, so that he suffered less professional
discrimination at the hands of the Second Republic than most other senior officers
of similar persuasion. He soon rose to even greater prominence as Chief of the
General Staff under the centre-right government of 1935.
Relieved of that post by the new Popular Front government of 1936, he was not
one of those officers who eagerly engaged in conspiracy against the left. Though
he kept in touch with the conspirators, a political insurrection by the military
was foreign to his background and temperament, so that he only committed
himself irretrievably to the conspiracy in its final stage, after the climactic crisis of
Republican affairs. In effect, he only committed himself fully to insurgency when
it seemed that it would be more dangerous not to rebel than to rebel.
There is no question that Franco had come to enjoy a certain charisma because
of the spectacular success of his military career, but this was charisma of a rela-
tively traditional and limited sort without political definition. Once the revolution-
ary process in Spanish politics became strongly developed in 1934, the search for
rightist alternatives was accentuated. Franco apparently took to reading books on
contemporary politics and economics, and even to studying English haphazardly,
in preparation for a more important role in this process, but it is not clear if this
nascent sense of mission went beyond being a major military, not political, leader
of the right. He was easily discouraged in his first attempt to enter politics through
a by-election in May 1936, and withdrew prior to the balloting. Nonetheless,
whereas prior to 1934 he had basically followed his professional star like most
ambitious young officers, during 1934-36 he developed a broader, if not fully
defined, sense of mission.
Once the Civil War began, Francos leadership became crucial, because he
commanded the only fully combat-ready military force, based in the Moroccan
Protectorate. Once the question of a new commander-in-chief and political leader
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196 S. G. Payne
of the insurgents was raised in September 1936, Franco encountered no rival and
little opposition among his fellow military commanders. His professional reputa-
tion towered over the others, though ironically some of his most zealous promot-
ers were the monarchists, who calculated that a military government led by
Franco would be the kind most likely to promote an early restoration of the
monarchy, even though there has never been any evidence that he made a pledge
to that effect. The outbreak of the Civil War stimulated a process of mutual politi-
cal radicalisation on both sides of the barricades. In the Republican zone it
encouraged a full-scale left-collectivist revolution, arguably the broadest, deepest
and, in some respects, most spontaneous worker rising in modern history.
Among the insurgent nationalists, the war and opposing revolution quickly radi-
calised the political agenda of much of the military leadership.
Franco had initially accepted the political goals of the insurgency, which was to
terminate leftist government and establish a conservative and authoritarian
Republican regime, though maintaining some of the Republican reforms. By the
time that he took over as head of state on 1 October, however, he increasingly
accepted what seemed to Franco an evident fact: he must construct a completely
alternative political system with a much more radical structure and agenda.
Whereas up to the first phase of the Civil War he would apparently have settled
for something like the Austrian regime of Engelbert Dollfuss or Antonio Salazars
Estado Novo in Portugal, after becoming head of state of a violent new regime
locked in the most extreme revolutionary/counterrevolutionary civil war, he
soon came to the conclusion that only a more forceful, categorical, and mobilised
new regime could succeed. For this the most useful model was Fascist Italy,
though he was aware of the danger of imitation and never proposed merely to
copy the Italian system.
It was especially important to overcome el error Primo de Rivera the failure to
develop structure, organisation or ideology, and this was where the acephalous
Falangist movement was most useful. When Franco took over the Party in April
1937 to make it the official state organisation, he merged it with the Carlists,
altering its name to the most complex and absurd of all the fascist-type move-
ments Falange Espaola Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-
Sindicalista (FET-JONS). He also made it clear that, even as the state adopted the
official Falangist programme, the new organisation was to become something of a
catch-all party that members of all other political groups in the Nationalist zone
could join.
It has never been clear how much Franco understood of fascist politics and
ideology. He appreciated its capacity for helping to build a firmly structured
authoritarian system and for achieving a more modern form of mass mobilisation,
even though in later years he would deride aspects of Falangist ideology, joking
that he had never been able to figure out the meaning of the Falangist dogma of
the vertical syndicate. Nonetheless, Javier Tusell, the most penetrating student
of Franco during the civil war years, has concluded that he became increasingly
interested in approximating a fuller fascistic style and structure by the end of the
conflict.
8
Even though Falangist ideology became official doctrine, Franco made it clear
from the beginning that this should not be considered a fixed and final dogma,
but that it might be subject to considerable alteration or elaboration in the future.
His regime was not founded or based upon the Falange, but on military power
and victory in the Civil War, so that the Falange was simply the first servant of an
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Franco and the Institutionalisation of Mission 197
eclectic new regime. The latters other main ideological pole was neo-traditional-
ist Catholicism, to a much greater degree than had ever been proposed by Jos
Antonio, producing a potentially unstable and fractious symbiosis.
Franco did not so much lead the new party as dominate and control it. The
Party would be led by its successive secretary-generals, who would not succeed
in completely disciplining the organisation until the later phases of the Second
World War. Though many party veterans resented Francos domination and his
rightist policies, they had little alternative. Only the Civil War had finally given
the movement strength, but even that had limited meaning, for the Civil War was
led by the military, not the Party. The level and quality of party leadership during
the Civil War had not been very high, and conditions of total civil war gave the
Party little room to manoeuvre. Any determined attempt by the Falange to
impose itself would have led to the most destructive internal conflict, bringing the
defeat of the Party and/or the Nationalist cause, or very likely both.
Franco was extremely successful in extending his leadership not merely over
the Party, but over the entire Nationalist war effort and society. The propaganda
organs built the mystique of the Caudillo (the old Spanish term for a military or
political leader). Franco thus reversed the terms, for example, of the Russian Civil
War. There, the White military had been disunited while Lenin established full
unity and discipline on the Red side. In Spain, Franco became the leader of a
unified, victorious movement, while the Left struggled perpetually with disunity.
There seems little question that a kind of charisma surrounded Franco by the
end of the Civil War. This had nothing to do with his physical appearance or
personal manner, and envoys reported back to his allies in Rome and Berlin that
the Spanish Generalissimo at first created a poor impression, with little of the great
leader about him. Even his tailoring was poor at first, as was common at that
time in the Spanish Army, though it would later improve. Francos charisma
stemmed above all from the mystique of total victory. It was not that his military
subordinates considered him a Napoleonic genius, which he clearly was not, but
a firm, confident commander of solid professional skills who avoided defeats and
had led them to final triumph. This feeling was strongest among the military but
was felt to some extent elsewhere as well.
In 1939 the official organs fomented a fascist style of leader adulation, with
photos on hand everywhere and ritual invocations of Franco, Franco, Franco,
drawn from Duce, Duce, Duce. By that time there was no thought of restoring the
monarchy. Franco clearly intended to lead a new type national authoritarian
regime that would be part of the New Order dawning in Europe. This did not
mean necessarily a complete Falangisation of the regime, but it did mean an
opportunity for it to play a more important role.
Behind the scenes, however, there was more than a little political contestation.
Before the war, Spain had a fully mobilised and diversified political society.
Franco had led forces drawn from the centre and all the right-wing of the political
spectrum, with the latter predominating. All these had accepted the need for
discipline and unity so long as the war lasted, but many of them expected some
kind of political change after victory had been achieved. Pressure came from
both kinds of monarchists, the mainline alfonsinos and the Carlist traditionalists.
More important in the short run, however, was the growing rivalry between the
Falangists and the military. These diverse sectors of Falangists, military men,
monarchists, Carlists, and political Catholics would later be termed the political
families of the regime. Their weakness lay in their mutual rivalry, cleverly
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198 S. G. Payne
exploited by the Caudillo. None of them, of course, was in a position to challenge
Franco directly, and the military, above all, had little interest in doing so.
Nonetheless, only during these early phases of the regime did Francos govern-
ment contain a figure who might in any way be considered a potential rival
leader. The eminence grise of the regime for its first six years was the prematurely
silver-haired Ramn Serrano Suer, brother-in-law of the Caudillos wife. Serrano
was extraordinarily well situated for this role as, first, a trusted close relative of
the Generalissimo and, second, as one of the very closest personal friends of the
late Jos Antonio, making it at least somewhat plausible to construct a Falangist
pedigree for him, though he had never been more than a fiancheggiatore of the
Party.
Serrano, not Franco, supervised (and, in fact, negotiated) the incorporation of
Falangists into the new system, and there is some indication that Franco initially
preferred to have him serve as the first Secretary General of the state party.
Serrano himself rejected this role, however, and subsequently held the more
important posts of Minister of the Interior (1938-40), in charge of domestic affairs,
and then, at the height of the Second World War, of Foreign Minister (1940-42). By
comparison, the Party secretary generals were figures of limited authority. It was
to Serrano, rather than to them, that the most determined Falangists looked for
leadership in enabling the Party to gain a more important place within the
regime.
No figure in recent Spanish history has enjoyed as many opportunities to
recount and to distort his own political biography as did the remarkably long-
lived Serrano Suer.
9
He insisted that his two basic goals were to structure the
totally arbitrary Francoist state as an institutionalised juridical regime and to
incorporate within it as much as possible of the doctrine of Jos Antonio Primo de
Rivera. This implied a regime more firmly organised like Fascist Italy, basically
the goal of most true Falangists. Here the principal obstacle was, first of all, the
chief of state himself, who preferred a much more eclectic system of divide-and-
rule, balancing the military, the Church, the Falangists, the monarchists, the
Carlists, pragmatic conservative economic interests, and so on.
The outbreak of the Second World War soon after conclusion of the Civil War
only increased Francos reluctance to make decisive new political commitments.
Complete victory by the Axis would have produced a more genuine and consis-
tent fascistisation, but from 1942 the course of the war moved in the opposite
direction, encouraging Francos continued eclecticism and indefinition while
increasingly compromising the role of Serrano Suer. The arrogance of Serrano
led the German ambassador to describe him as the most hated man in Spain,
while elsewhere he would be known with some exaggeration as the minister
of the Axis. His expulsion from government in September 1942 was, however,
determined less by foreign pressures than by internal political rivalries. The fall of
Mussolini less than a year later then produced the beginning of a formal de-
fascistisation of the regime that began in August 1943, eventually leading to a
drastic downgrading of the Party itself.
10
It would be an exaggeration to call
Serrano a true rival of his brother-in-law, but he was the only figure in the history
of the regime who constituted an alternative centre of power. No subsequent
minister, not even Francos alter ego, Admiral Carrero Blanco, occupied such a
position.
However, Serrano Suer was never the official leader of the Falange, and
was much resented by some sectors of the Party (which in fact encouraged his
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Franco and the Institutionalisation of Mission 199
eventual political elimination), but he did stand as the principal representative of
the fascist tendency in Spanish government during the first half of the Second
World War. In post-fascist Europe, the Party leadership would become increas-
ingly bureaucratised and of diminishing significance. Between 1945 and 1948, for
example, there was not even an official secretary general. The Party would never
be much more than an administrative convenience of Franco, its longevity
directly proportionate to its subordination and pliability. The longest-lived
fascist party in Europe survived by becoming the least fascist of all its major
counterparts.
The main challenges to Francos leadership from within the regime all occurred
during the first four years after the Civil War, from 1939 to 1943. For three years
the main activists were Falangist leaders and Army generals, and Franco
shrewdly allowed them to cancel each other out, since the ire of the military was
overwhelmingly directed at the Falangists and not at the government. Falangist
attempts to gain support from Nazi officials came to naught, while the conspiracy
by a small group of Falangists to assassinate Franco proved stillborn. Various
generals sought at times to play political roles but none was in a position to chal-
lenge Franco. As Tusell says of the generals, they did not conspire so much as
merely talk about conspiring.
Nonetheless, Francos prestige within the regime did decline during these
years. His failure to give clear definition to his system, its rapidly growing
corruption, the misbehaviour of Falangists, and the growth of dire economic
shortages from 1940 on had the cumulative effort of drawing more and more crit-
icism from within the regime, inevitably tarnishing the lustre of the victorious
Generalissimo. He had to reorganise his government significantly both in 1941 and
1942 because of the rivalry between the Falangists on the one hand, and the mili-
tary and Carlists on the other. By 1942, however, he had used the opportunity to
develop a new cadre of ministers that was both stable and, from the viewpoint of
the regime, more effective politically.
If Francos internal manoeuvring was adroit, his international diplomacy was
not as pragmatic and prudent as would be claimed afterward. His policy of non-
belligerence from 1940 to 1943 constituted a basically pro-Axis stance, but he did
carefully avoid taking the final plunge, which would have proved absolutely
fatal. The return to neutrality in 1943 came too late to re-establish the Spanish
government as a true neutral in the eyes of the Allies, but it succeeded in retaining
the independence which, together with considerable political tacking, would
enable the regime to survive foreign pressure in the long run.
Conversely, as the war swung in favour of the Allies in 1943, pressure from the
mainline monarchists became intense, their argument being above all that Franco
was too identified with the Axis to provide stable government for Spain in the
future. In September 1943, for the one and only time in the history of the regime, a
majority of the lieutenant generals sent a very polite, carefully disciplined and
worded letter to Franco, asking discreetly if he did not think that the time had
come to restore the monarchy. No matter how obsequiously this was done, it
constituted the most severe internal challenge to his leadership that Franco would
ever face. He responded to the lieutenant generals with calm and courtesy one or
two at a time, and they never summoned the courage for a collective confronta-
tion with him. Franco also quickly promoted several of his unconditional
supporters to alter the composition of the high command, and the signatories of
the letter either changed their minds or refused to press the issue.
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200 S. G. Payne
When the regime began to face an external challenge in 1944-45, with the begin-
ning of a leftist insurgency, the complete triumph of the Allies, and the interna-
tional ostracism of the regime, it in fact became more united internally. The
danger of the return of the Left brought a closing of ranks, and Francos style of
leadership calm, disciplined, completely self-confident, indifferent to criticism
abroad proved very effective. The military rallied firmly behind their leader, the
Falangists could not possibly do anything else, and other civilian sectors of the
regime largely followed suit. The years between 1944 and 1948 provided the last
major test of Francos leadership. He succeeded both in maintaining stability and
in carrying out a redefinition of the regime, while co-opting the monarchist issue
through the referendum of 1947. The latter established the monarchist succession
at Francos command and also provided a modicum of traditional legitimacy to
him by affirming him as regent for life. All this taken together placed his leader-
ship on such secure footing that there would be no further serious challenges
during his lifetime.
It was no mean feat, accomplished despite certain major mistakes and flawed
strategies. It was not easy to overcome the Axis stigma, which to some degree
would remain with the regime to the very end. Franco nonetheless managed to
maintain a certain basic unity among the forces which he had led to victory in the
Civil War, despite their mutual antagonisms, and this was indispensable.
Conclusion
By 1950 Francos prestige within the regime was stronger than it had been for ten
years, and would never be significantly diminished. It was not based on any char-
ismatic talents of physical presence or oratory, of which he had none, but on mili-
tary and political success. Moreover, though Franco was not a typical charismatic
leader, he had the latters sense of mission in his goal of building a new political
system and a new Spain. Franco was personally convinced that his mission had
been fully vindicated by his complete victory in the Civil War and that he was
legitimate ruler of the country by right of conquest. He was sufficiently sophisti-
cated, of course, to realise that things could never be stated so boldly, and thus
publicly he emphasised the achievements involved in and produced by this
victory, as well as the ideal goals that he sought for Spain. This sense of mission
was shared by a minority, while his leadership was merely accepted as an accom-
plished fact by many more.
It was, like nearly all other examples of successful leadership, the product of a
particular personality in a particular time and place. During the first half of the
twentieth century, Spain was an underdeveloped but rapidly changing society
which generated intense conflict. It retained, however, strong elements of social
and cultural conservatism as well as religious tradition, in addition to a strong
desire for national development, upon which Franco was able to build his leader-
ship. Franco outlived his own era and the social-cultural structures on which his
power originally rested, which meant that his kind of leadership, as he foresaw,
would be unrepeatable. He knew that only the monarchy would have the legiti-
macy to maintain such a regime, but just before his death realised that even the
monarchy could not attempt to do so. The great conflict-era of European history
in the age of world wars the key to Francos success had long since come to an
end. Any successful leadership of Spain in the future would have to accommo-
date the democratic institutions of contemporary Europe.
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Franco and the Institutionalisation of Mission 201
Notes
1. On distinctions between fascism and related movements, see S. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-
1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
2. There are two uncritically supportive biographical works on Ledesma, J. M. Snchez Diana,
Ramiro Ledesma Ramos (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1975), which is briefer but slightly superior to T.
Borrs, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1971). See also S. Payne, Fascism in Spain,
1923-1977 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), pp.54-65.
3. J. Gil Pecharromn, Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera: Retrato de un Visionario (Madrid: Temas de
Hoy, 1996).
4. Payne (note 2), pp.469-79.
5. M. P. de Rivera y Urquijo (ed.), Papeles Pstumos de Jos Antonio (Barcelona: Plaza y Jans, 1996).
6. On the early Falange see also S. Payne, Falange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).
7. S. Payne, The Franco Regime (Madison, WI: University of Madison Press, 1987), pp.645-6; P.
Preston, Franco: A Bibliography (London: HarperCollins, 1993); R. de la Cierva, Franco: la historia
(Madrid: Fenix, 2001).
8. J. Tusell, Franco en la Guerra Civil: una Biografia Poltica (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992). Two contrast-
ing points of view can be found in C. Blanco Escol, La Incompetencia Militar de Franco (Madrid:
Alianza, 1999), and J. Semprn, El Genio Militar de Franco (Madrid: Actas, 2000).
9. See R. Serrano Suer, Entre Hendaya y Gibraltar: Noticia y Reflexion, Frente a una Leyenda, Sobre
Nuestra Politica en dos Guerras (Madrid: Ediciones y Publicaciones Espaoles, 1947), which was his
first autobiography. After the death of his brother-in-law, Suer published the much more exten-
sive Memorias: Entre el Silencio y la Propaganda, la Historia Como Fue (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977). See
also H. Saa, El Franquismo sin Mitos: Conversaciones con Serrano Suer (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1982),
which is a useful text. There are two official biographies: R. Garca Lahiguera, Ramn Serrano
Suer: Un Documento para la Historia (Madrid: Argos Vergara, 1985), and I. Merino, Serrano Suer:
Historia de una Conducta (Barcelona: Planeta, 1996), although the latter of the two is something of a
travesty. In addition, there have been other presentations, such as his two genuinely marathon
lectures at the University of Madrid Summer School at El Escorial in 1994 and 1995, remarkable for
a nonagenarian, since they averaged three and a half hours each, and which have been published
as Poltica de Espaa, 1936-1975 (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1995).
10. I have described the process briefly in S. Payne, The Defascistisation of the Franco Regime, 1942-
1975, in S. U. Larsen (ed.), Modern Europe after Fascism, 1943-1980s, Volume 2 (Boulder: NY: Social
Science Monographs, 1998), pp.1580-1606, and at greater length in Payne, (note 2), pp.363-468.
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