Chapter 4: The Nationalist Opposition
CEDA
"The principal opposition to Republican reformism and the possibility of revolution took the form of conservative political Catholicism, the CEDA. Though the CEDA was not merely a conservative party or a loyal opposition to the revolutionaries and the Left Republicans, neither did it represent fascism or the radical right. Its leaders insisted on constitutionalism and legal, parliamentary tactics, eschewing violence, street ac- tion, and paramilitary militias. The CEDA represented above all the Catholic middle classes and smallholders of northern Spain. As indicated earlier, it became the largest mass party in the country, and its leaders were fairly confident of winning power by electoral means. Indeed, they increased their vote in 1936 over that of 1933 and remained the most popular single party in Spain only five months before the Civil War.
After Catholicism, the most pronounced characteristic of the CEDA was ambiguity, and its ultimate goals remained vague. It espoused Catholic corporatism and a reform of the Republican constitution, which opponents charged would simply convert Spain into an authoritarian corporate state. Before long, many of the ordinary members and followers of the party were looking back with nostalgia on the monarchy, while its youth branch, the Juventudes de Acción Popular (JAP; Popular Action Youth), adopted some of the outward trappings of fascism, talking of the need for strong leadership and a powerful state."
"It was only natural that a moderate right-wing movement like the CEDA would win the backing of the great bulk of middle-class Catholic and conservative opinion in Spain. By definition, the conservative middle classes wanted to avoid trouble, and a moderate legalistic alternative reflected their habits and values fully. Small groups of the Spanish right, however, disagreed with the moderate reaction and propounded a more radical alternative. While most monarchists followed the CEDA, a select group of doctrinaires and activists organized for a new system."
Accion Espanola and Calvo Sotelo
"he new radical right formed around a journal called Acción Española that began publication at the close of 1931. The activists of Acción Española were drawn from three areas: maurista conservatism, social Catholicism, and Carlism. "
"Acción Espanola pledged to revive the traditional Spanish ideology, grounded in religion and in strong monarchist institutions. It derived much inspiration from the Primo de Rivera regime, with which nearly all its members had been associated; "
"The groups key political leader was José Calvo Sotelo,...Acción Española's political branch, had been organized earlier in the year after the CEDA rejected the groups principles. The CEDA in turn was denounced by Calvo for being too moderate, compromising, and ambiguous—insufhciently nationalist and authoritarian—whereas Renovacién Espanola itself proved to be too small and narrow a sect. He was ready at one point in 1934 to enter Falange Espanola, the new fascist party to be discussed below, but was rejected by its leaders as too dangerous a rival and as too “rightist.”
Calvo consequently tried to form a broader new movement of the radical right, which took shape as the Bloque Nacional, organized in December 1934 in the wake of the October insurrection in Asturias.
...The directly elected Cortes was to be replaced by an “organically” organized corporate cham- ber, analogous to that of Italy or Portugal, and social and economic problems resolved through state regulation, economic intervention, and reflationary policies. Calvo Sotelo clearly understood that this was not likely to come about through political mobilization but would probably require forcible intervention by the military. The new state would adopt a militantly nationalist policy and foster the development of the armed forces in particular. It would reject laicism and restore the Catholic identity of Spanish government.
The radical right of Acción Espanola and Calvo Sotelo differed from generic fascism not in any squeamishness about violence and dictatorship, or even in any differences over the goal of empire, but in their distinct socioeconomic strategies and cultural formulae. Acción Espanola invoked traditional rightist elites and feared the development of new competitors, even if nationalist in orientation. Both the neomonarchists and Spanish fascists strove for a corporate state, but for the latter this meant the mobilization of labor and a drastic new articulation of national interests behind national syndicalism."
"In practice, the Bloque Nacional proved a political failure, drawing little popular support and winning few seats in the final Republican elections of 1936. During the final political crisis of the Republic, however, with Gil Robless moderate conservatism discredited and the Falangist leaders imprisoned, Calvo Sotelo emerged as the primary leader of the rightist opposition. His murder by Republican police in July 1936 was calculated to decapitate that opposition but instead became the final spark that set off the Civil War. It was an unprecedented crime, the only in- stance in the history of west European parliamentary government in which the leader of the parliamentary opposition had been murdered by the government police, and it dramatized the severe limitations to constitutional government and civil rights that had developed by then in Spain.
Analysis of the formal structure of the Franco regime in its plenitude— especially the “high phase” of Franquism from 1937 to 1959—-soon reveals that the Franquist system was built on the ideas and doctrines of Calvo Sotelo and the Acción Española group more than on those of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the Falangists. The reliance on the military, a corporative Cortes, and the instauración of monarchy all corresponded to this doctrine. The only notable Falangist component, the syndical system, never came close to achieving the Falangist goal of a national syndical state, but simply functioned as an agency of state regulation more or less along lines conceived by Calvo Sotelo. Moreover, the intensely Catholic character of the eventual Franquist system in its heyday corresponded much more to the concepts of Acción Española than to those of the Falangists.*
More clearly than either the moderate Gil Robles or the radical Primo de Rivera, Calvo Sotelo grasped that the most feasible alternative to the Republican system was neither conservative parliamentarianism nor a popular national syndicalism but an integrated mobilization of all the resources of the counterrevolutionary right. The difference, of course, was not a matter of tactics but of values. To the CEDA leader such an extreme of dictatorship was repugnant, while to the Falangist it was inadequate and reactionary. Calvo Sotelos politics became those of catastrophism. The rightist reaction of the military on which he came to rely could only be achieved in a situation of intense polarization and impending cataclysm. Hence the irony that Calvo Sotelo's own assassination formed an integral part of that very process on which he depended to realize his ideas and achieve his goals."
The revival of Carlism
"just as the emergence of the anticlerical First Republic had reawakened Carlism in 1873, so the anticlericalism and radical mass leftist politics of the Second Republic revived Carlism in the early 1930s. "
"During the first phase of the Republic the main branches of Carlism were reunited and given vigorous leadership by a new secretary general in Seville, Manuel Fal Conde. The Carlists joined with the Alfonsine monarchists of Renovación Espanola behind Calvo Sotelos Bloque Nacional, though the association remained an uneasy one. The Carlists in fact enjoyed rather more popular support than Calvo Sotelos monarchists, though their following was disproportionately concentrated in the north- eastern historically autonomous province (formerly kingdom) of Navarre and adjacent territories.
The principal new statement of Carlist doctrine was Víctor Praderas El Estado nuevo (1935). In it he defined Catholic identity and a form of societal corporatism, under monarchy, that would be autonomous from the state though partially regulated by it and that would also be compatible with partial regional decentralization."
Falange Espanola
"The first fascist political group in Spain was formed not by the esthete Giménez Caballero but by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, an underemployed university graduate who had earlier specialized in mathematics and phi- losophy. Here again the inspiration was primarily Italian, for the title of the groups weekly, La Conquista del Estado, was copied from a sometime Italian publication of the same name by the radical Fascist writer Curzio Malaparte. Ledesma was followed by a mere handful of ten young stu- dents or ex-students in their twenties, and began publication in March 1931, one month before proclamation of the Republic. In August a radical nationalist organization appeared in Valladolid called Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica, organized by a radical right-wing Catholic lawyer and former teacher Onésimo Redondo Ortega. The two joined forces in October 1931 to form the first categoric Spanish fascist political organiza- tion, the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, a typically verbose Spanish formulation that resulted in the acronym JONS and the term jonsistas for the members."
"The JONS adopted a generically fascist program (consistent with the definition established at the end of chapter 2), affirming extreme nationalism, dictatorship, violence, and the expansion of empire...neither Ledesma nor any of his col- leagues ever elaborated any precise, detailed socioeconomic theory, nor was Ledesma able to develop any plans for direct action, because the group had no more than about two thousand followers in central and north central Spain. "
"A more vigorous, better-financed attempt at a Spanish fascism was essayed by elements of the extreme right in 1933...The leader who came to the fore was José Antonio Primo de Rivera,"
"The Falange began with much more financial support from those in big business close to the radical right than did the JONS, prompting the latter to merge with it in early 1934, the resulting organization being called Falange Espanola de las JONS. During the next two years, and indeed all the way down to the beginning of the Civil War, the Falange was distinguished primarily by its insignificance. Like the Romanian Iron Guard and several other European fascist movements, it relied primarily on its student clientele, but unlike the Romanian movement, it completely failed to generate any broad lower- or middle-class support.
The only advantage of this period in the wilderness was that it gave the movement's leaders some time to reflect on what they were about. After a year or so, José Antonio Primo Rivera began to move “left,” as the national syndicalism of the Falangists took on more radical overtones. There was a somewhat belated reaction to the danger of mimesis, as Ledesma complained of the “mimicry” shown by Falangists, and before the close of 1934 Falangist leaders were denying that they were fascists"
"Criticism of the conservatism of the Italian regime was not uncommon among Falangists, though it was muted. In May 1935 José Antonio visited the offices of the CAUR, the so-called Fascist International, in Rome, but did not see Mussolini again, and in September of that year attended the international meeting of the CAUR in Montreux as an observer. He also visited Nazi Germany very briefly in the spring of 1934 but did not find the experience particularly attractive and did not have a personal meeting with Hitler"
"Unlike some other fascist movements, the Falangists did develop an official program, the Twenty-Seven Points, before the close of 1934. These exhibited all the main points of fascistic doctrine, and in the eco- nomic sphere called for development of a national syndicalist state...José Antonio would later declare that “property, as we now conceive it, is coming to an end, ‘© but his aim was to guarantee that property fulfilled social responsibilities and not to seek its elimination...The solution to perpetual under- employment was clearly seen to lie in industrialization that would absorb excess labor.”"
"A mystical sense of nationalism was the outstanding feature of Falangism. José Antonio stressed the “eternal metaphysic of Spain” in contrast to its present miseries, and national unity—requiring the suppression of partyism and dissident regionalism—held the highest priority. Together with most of the radical right, Falangists insisted that Spain had declined ever since it ceased to be an empire, and that unity could be achieved only by offering common participation in a transcendent cause. Borrowing a concept of Ortega y Gasset, José Antonio declared Spain to be “una unidad de destino en lo universal” (a unity of destiny in universal affairs). Spanish people could enjoy unity, freedom, justice, and prosperity only as part of a successful nation, which in turn could flourish only by fulfilling a broader destiny. The Falangist program proclaimed “We have a will to empire,” and yet the Falangist leaders made it categorically clear that they harbored no dreams of foreign conquest. “Empire” meant above all the projection of Hispanic culture and values.'* Though José Antonio sometimes spoke of drastic changes in the offing in foreign affairs, he also declared the era of colonial conquest at an end, '* and showed clear interest only in some kind of federation with Portugal and the development of a sort of cultural leadership or hegemony over Spanish America.
In religious affairs Falangism officially proclaimed its Catholicism but distinguished itself from the clericalism of the right and insisted on the separation of church and state."
"During the Falange's first several months of existence, nine of its members were murdered by the left with- out a single fatal counterattack by Falangists.* Spokesmen of the right said that José Antonio’ party smelled more of Franciscanism than of fascism and actively incited it to take up arms against the left, something which began only in June 1934."
"José Antonio stopped using the term fascist before the end of 1934 and the term totalitarian before the end of 1935, and he occasionally referred to rightist conspirators as “fascist windbags (fascistas llenos de viento); yet however diffident and differential may have been his approach, he never renounced the basic fascist goals in politics.
Up until the spring of 1936, the Falange probably never had more than ten thousand regular members. "
"The strongest nuclei of the Falange were to be found in Madrid” and in the Valladolid district of León—Old Castile. The myth of Castile and the history of Castilian leadership in Spanish culture and history was important in Falangist doctrine as a counterweight to regional nationalism in the peninsulas periphery.” When all is said and done, the major Falangist appeal had to be made to the rural and small-town society of north-central Spain, which was Catholic and also conservative. Yet these regions were primarily mobilized by the conservative and Catholic CEDA, and showed no interest in a radical fascist alternative until the political breakdown of the system began in the spring of 1936."
"In August 1934 a pact was signed with Renovación Española in which the Falange pledged to do nothing to hinder the activities of the monarchists, in return for a monthly subsidy,® but this was soon discontinued. The hemorrhage of right-wing members continued, for they found the Falange insufficiently monarchist and clerical. Ramiro Ledesma turned against José Antonio early in 1935, charging that he lacked toughness and aggressiveness in leadership, and ended being expelled from the party himself.
The year 1935 was a time of penury for the Falange. On June 3 the Italian Foreign Ministry directed the Italian press attaché in Paris to subsidize the Spanish movement in the amount of 50,000 lire (about $4,000 US) per month, but after six months this was cut in half. Such modest assistance—evidently much less than that provided by the Soviet Union to the Spanish Communist Party at the time—came nowhere near meeting the financial needs of the party. It was during this desperate period of isolation and lack of resources that Falangist spokesmen, led by José Antonio, redoubled emphasis on some of the more radical aspects of their program ranging from drastic socioeconomic change to the need for new and younger elites, and also made futile efforts to generate some sort of armed revolt against the Republican system.
Antifascism more than ever seemed more powerful than fascism in Spain, for in the aftermath of the 1934 insurrection and the repression that followed, antifascism became a central rallying point for the left. Ramiro Ledesma shrewdly observed at that time that if fascism meant radical politics, mass organization, violent tactics, and arbitrary government, in Spain, the rightists were “apparently fascist but, in many instances, essentially antifascist,*’ either because of their legalism, squeamishness about violence, or reluctance to engage in drastic demagogy or mass organization."
"Though Giménez Caballero had been the first to translate the Italian Fascist Malapartes Technique of the Coup d Etat, it was read as eagerly among some of the anarchist elite of the FAI as among Falangists.* "
"Abandoned by both the self-styled “left fascists” of Ledesma and the radical right, the Falangists redoubled their fascistic radicalism without drawing any response whatever. The very qualities displayed in their propaganda—demagogy, secularism, and socioeconomic extremism— made them anathema to the middle classes and the right. The question mark that Ledesma placed in the title of his memoirs that year—, Fascismo en España? —seemed fully appropriate. In the final Republican elections of February 1936, the Falangist ticket gained only 44,000 votes in all Spain
...his was probably the weakest showing of fascism in electoral competition in any European country where a national fascist party contested elections. Even in social democratic Scandinavia, domestic Nazi parties managed to win at least 1 or 2 percent of the national vote. Fascism was extremely weak in Spain for somewhat the same reasons enumerated for the weakness of nationalism in general in chapter 1. A neutral in the First World War, Spain lacked the many frustrated army veterans who played such key roles in the early phases of Fascism and Nazism in Italy and Ger- many. In Spain, mobilized nationalism was inverted—expressed through the intense regional nationalism of Catalans and Basques directed against the Spanish nation-state. "