Headlines In the Spanish press reported cautiously on July 11: “Reorganization of the Spanish government; General Muñoz Grandes named vice-president.” Most Anglo-American papers, from the New York Times down, proclaimed: “Franco names successor.” More accurately, the Paris Monde put the word “successor” in quotes.
Spaniards displayed little overt interest in the shuffle and were unimpressed by the revamped cabinet’s policy statement—written, officials agreed, with an eye on the European Economic Community. The change most thoughtful Spaniards believe to be on the horizon would affect the whole regime, not simply a handful of medium-grade ministers. The appointment of General Muñoz Grandes as vice-president merely formalized a transitional arrangement whose existence everyone took for granted; it contributed nothing to resolving the fundamental problem of the Spanish succession. On this score, officials and die-hard supporters of the regime are still apprehensive. The opposition is excited, and making an effort to thrust their tactical and doctrinal differences into the background. Even normally apolitical citizens—the majority—are listening more keenly than ever before to foreign broadcasts. On the other hand, Western diplomats in Madrid are unconvinced that the regime is approaching its climacteric. Their confidence in its durability is reminiscent of the complacency one encountered in the same quarters in places like Cairo and Baghdad on the eve of revolutionary change.
“Franco is still pretty solid,” they say, “and he has no serious challenger.” The internal opposition? “Hopelessly divided.” The republican exiles? “Nobody wants them back.” The army? “Wholly loyal to Franco.” The Church? “Getting ready to jump onto the fence, but still supports Franco.” The people? “Better off than ever.” Might they not be tiring of dictatorship? “The regime here is authoritarian, true; but it’s not totalitarian. And it has relaxed a lot in the last three or four years. This isn’t Hungary—or Yugoslavia. It’s not so very different from de Gaulle’s France. . . .”
It is true that nothing could look less like an iron curtain than Spain’s welcoming frontiers. If the French authorities happen to be on the lookout for one of their errant colonels, or an itinerant plastiqueur, it may well be the French side of the border that is the more suggestive of a police-state. The Spaniards wave you over the line, stamp last week’s date on the wrong page of your passport, salute and wish you buen viaje. The nature of the regime is never so obtrusive as to offend the nostrils of the millions of tourists who flock there every summer. One gets brief—if frequent—whiffs of authoritarianism rather than an unremitting stench.
At the entrance to every town and village stands a monumental reproduction in wood or metal of the yoke-and-arrows symbol which the present regime has taken over from the Catholic kings. Slogans and stenciled portraits of General Franco disfigure neat white cottage walls. The slogans are the same from one end of Spain to another, ranging from the merely cretinous Franco! Franco! Franco! (which also graces the front cover of Spanish telephone directories) to the sardonic España Una Grande y Libre, via the mocking Arriba España! In village streets, at major intersections, and in the vicinity of bridges and power stations, civil guards are on patrol in their green uniforms and sinister black hats: grim alien men—Andalusians in the north, northerners in the south, switched to a fresh post every two years or so lest they put down roots and make friends. They are always in pairs, never unarmed. You will see them in village fondas eating a late supper, their backs to the wall, one with a rifle across his knees, the other nursing a tommygun, like troops in an occupied country.
The Guardia Civil is not, of course, an invention of General Franco’s. It was founded in 1844 and has behaved in other periods like an occupying army. “When a man joins the Civil Guard,” Ramón Sender once said, “he declares civil war.” But nothing more aptly symbolizes the present regime than this ubiquitous force of brave, ignorant, mistrustful, mistrusted men: their attitude to the “foreign” populations they watch over is precisely that of the regime. Political offenders and strikers are still tried by military tribunals. When the chief of state goes on a provincial tour, suspected republican sympathizers are rounded up by the hundreds in the villages and towns along his route.
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The “Occupying Army” mentality even influenced the regime’s handling of economic affairs for many years. “Ours is neither a capitalist nor a socialist economy,” a distinguished Spanish economist told me last year. “It is a predatory economy: the sort of economy you would expect an old-fashioned conquistador to impose. Spoils—in the shape of lucrative posts, monopolies, and permits—for the victors; subjection for the vanquished. An export tax, the equivalent of a discriminatory tariff in foreign markets, was imposed on one important sector for a time because the economic conjuncture favored its products and would therefore have benefited a group of businessmen known to lack enthusiasm for the regime. The minister responsible admits in private that the idea was imposed on him from on high.”
The political setup is probably better described as a conquistador regime than by resort to words like fascist and Falangist. Its establishment was simply an act of military conquest, dependent for success on German, Italian, and Portuguese aid and the use of Moroccan conscripts. Ideology was grafted on later. Neither Franco nor even the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Riviera, was ever a convinced fascist.
José Antonio, son of the General Primo de Riviera who was Spain’s dictator in the 20’s, was impressed by the hyperbole of Mussolini, Maurras, and the Action française, but he saw the Falange as a “poetic movement” rather than as a party with a prosaic political and economic program. (Dionisio Ridruejo, who was the Falange’s propaganda chief from 1938 through 1940, estimates that 90 per cent of its members had no clear political ideas in the movement’s early years.) Like the founders of many other right-wing extremist groups, in Spain and elsewhere, Jos6 Antonio had no scruples against seeking subsidies from the conservative bankers and landowners he professed to despise; but he was too civilized to go the whole fascist hog. His execution by the republicans (inevitable in the circumstances) in November 1936, four months after the military revolt which touched off the civil war, removed the only significant right-wing leader whose sights were set—however imprecisely—on something higher than the preservation of privilege and the subjugation of the working class.
General Franco has never been anything more complicated than a franquista—a supporter of General Franco. Providence served him well in providing him with an ideological cloak in the shape of the leaderless Falange, whose doctrine was so vague that it could be molded and interpreted at will. In every town his troops occupied, communists, anarchists, and opportunists of all kinds flocked to join it, as eagerly as grateful right-wingers, in order to acquire protective coloring. When, in 1943, the defeat of German and Italian fascism came into sight, Franco converted the Falange into his tool. Its membership diminished, and its acting secretary-general, Vivar Tellez, suggested that, as it no longer had any political significance, it might as well be disbanded. But Franco still found it useful: as a potential terrorist arm—“If [opposition elements] try to frustrate our historic destiny,” he declared in 1956, “we shall unleash the Falange . . . to engulf them”; as an instrument for controlling the workers and students, through its ancillary sindicatos (membership of which is compulsory); and as a constituent of the elaborate complex of checks and balances with which he governs Spain.
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The Caudillo’s regime has never been a monolith. It is a mobile, the survival of which has depended upon his skill in offsetting one component with another—in balancing Church and Falange, Falange and monarchists, general and general, faction and faction. Within the Falange, a delicate equilibrium has been maintained between Catholic traditionalist and covertly anticlerical jonsista (“national syndicalist”) tendencies. Within the Church, Opus Dei (a wealthy secret lay order) has been cultivated as a counterweight to the Jesuits and other traditional influences,1 and Catholic Action Workers’ fraternities have been allowed sufficient scope to preoccupy Opus Dei. Fiefs and perquisites have been carefully apportioned among the more influential generals.
Officially, Franco’s Spain is a kingdom to which the Bourbon monarchy will be restored when the Caudillo dies or retires. But the Council of the Realm, whose nominal purpose is to help Franco make arrangements for the restoration, has little prestige and less power; and the monarchists are divided. Whereas the ultrareactionary Carlists, who fought for Franco during the civil war, are allowed to propagate their cause, the statements of the principal Bourbon pretender, Don Juan, who has kept aloof from the present regime, are subject to censorship; and in June, Don Juan’s leading liberal supporters were deported to the Canary Islands. In order to confuse monarchist opinion further, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of Don Juan’s claim, Franco and his ministers have made gestures from time to time in favor of Don Juan Carlos (Juan’s son, whom they consider less intelligent, and therefore more pliable, than his father), Don Jaime (Juan’s elder brother, who renounced his claim to the throne in 1945, after contracting a morganatic marriage, but was encouraged to revive his claim last year), and even Don Alfonso (Jaime’s son).
Obviously, the moment all doubts about the succession are removed, and detailed arrangements are made for the transfer of power, General Franco will cease to be indispensable. He has every incentive to prolong the uncertainty. He has been assisted until recently by the average Spaniard’s fear of the very word “politics,” by the war-weariness of the Spanish people (most Spanish famines lost one or two members during the civil war, and many lost several), as well as by Spain’s moral and political remoteness from the rest of Europe.
But the influx of millions of tourists—many of them car-owning workers—from France, England, and Germany, and letters and visits from the million or so Spaniards who, for political or economic reasons, have left Spain since 1938, have opened Spanish eyes to the socio-economic revolution that is transforming northwestern Europe and awakened a desire to participate in it. And a generation is now of age which has no clear memory of the civil war and is less intimidated than the people over forty by Franco’s machinery of repression—partly because some of its leaders are disillusioned franquistas or the sons of Franco’s own officials and officers who, by virtue of their family connections, have acquired influential social and professional footholds within the establishment. One opposition group with which I was in touch recently included an army captain, a general’s son, and the son of a colonel of the Civil Guard. Among the militants of the left-socialist Popular Liberation Front arrested in mid-June were the sons of a nationalist admiral and a Falangist marquis. In Madrid recently an anti-Franco student agitator was tortured in the basement of the building in which his father, a senior police official, has his office.
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The regime only narrowly escaped disaster in 1959, under the stress of economic incompetence and corruption; but advisers and loans were rushed in, just in time, by the United States government and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. The only casualty was what was left of the Falange’s vague economic philosophy (compounded chiefly of a hankering for self-sufficiency and a dislike of “Anglosaxon” capitalism). Liberal Spaniards ask ruefully whether the United States and its allies would have acted so swiftly to save a liberal or social-democratic regime, and seem doubtful when one replies: “Of course.”2 But, at heart, they are grateful for the 1959 rescue operation, and not only because of the embarrassment it caused the Falange. The technical reforms and stabilization measures which U.S. and OEEC advisers persuaded the Spanish government to accept have already, during the last two years, achieved a considerable liberalization of the economy, sound industrial expansion, and (aided by tourism) a balance-of-payments surplus. Economic liberalization is inevitably generating an impetus toward political liberalization: whereas the introverted autarchism of the first postwar decade fostered middlemen, influence-peddlers, and bureaucrats, Spain’s revamped, post-1959 economy is stimulating the more liberal-minded, forward-looking elements of the middle class and facilitating a reassertion of working-class rights and responsibilities.
In the past year, the equilibrium of the regime has been disturbed three times: by General Franco’s shooting accident on December 24, by the wave of strikes in April and May, and by the crisis which blew up over the European Movement in June.
When Franco learned that he would have to undergo an operation on his hand he hurriedly named General Muñoz Grandes, Chief of the General Staff, and two other generals to act as his political executors; but he did not have time to brief them adequately, and although all three favored restoring Don Juan, if Franco died, they disagreed over details of timing and procedure and the army’s role in the future regime. Their disagreement was by no means perilous or profound, and it raised no problems because Franco recovered quickly; but the dangers inherent in this kind of situation impressed both supporters and opponents of the regime when the facts leaked out, and both the Church hierarchy and the Council of the Realm were annoyed that they had not been consulted.
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A flurry of maneuvering and claim-staking followed this crisis. The right wing of the army, which wants a “strong” regime to succeed Franco, whoever heads it, improved its position through the appointment of a new Captain-General for the Madrid region (a key internal-security post). The ministers and senior officials in charge of economic affairs, who form what might—with some exaggeration—be called the liberal wing of the administration, pressed for and obtained an earlier announcement than had originally been intended of the government’s desire for association with the European Economic Community. The Catholic Church, for over twenty years one of the firmest pillars of the Franco dictatorship, made known its sympathy for Don Juan, and in an official Vatican statement referred to his son Juan Carlos as “Prince of Asturias” (a title reserved for the heir of the reigning Spanish king.) Laying up treasure on the left, also, the Spanish hierarchy authorized two leftward-leaning, and leftist-infiltrated, Catholic movements—the Catholic Action Workers’ Fraternities (HOAC) and Catholic Working Class Youth (JOC)—to cooperate with the clandestine socialists and other republicans in agitating for better working conditions and free trade unions.
According to ecclesiastical sources, the hierarchy is alarmed by the growing anti-clericalism of the Spanish workers. Catholic indoctrination is compulsory in all schools and universities, and the Church may censor all publications of a religious or philosophical nature; no non-Catholic may become a teacher, a civil servant, an officer, a journalist, or a nurse.3 A Spaniard wishing to buy or rent an apartment in a state-subsidized housing development, or seeking municipal employment, or applying for relief or charitable aid (including supplies donated by the U.S. government under the “Food for Peace” program) is generally required to produce a priest’s recommendation. Despite these pressures—partly, no doubt, because of them—fewer than 25 per cent of Spanish workers are practicing Catholics. Even convinced Catholics complain of the opulence, worldliness, and “commercialism” of the Church, and priests joke bitterly about the real-estate deals and business methods of the powerful religious orders; but the chief cause of anticlericalism is the Church’s close association with the regime—one of the few regimes on earth to have qualified for a papal blessing. Whereas in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Saragossa not more than 15 per cent of working-class adults (barely 10 per cent of the men) attend mass, in corresponding parishes in industrial Basque towns, where most priests (but not the bishops) remained loyal to the Republic and are still hostile to Franco, the turnout is nearer 35 per cent.
In authorizing HOAC and JOC to associate themselves with working-class aspirations and cooperate with the left-wing opposition, Cardinal-Primate Pla y Deniel hopes to snap Spain’s traditional link between socio-political discontent and anti-clericalism. But he wishes also to bring into being a Catholic trade-union movement which may serve as the cornerstone of a Christian democrat party on the French-German-Italian model.4. Clandestine Christian democrat groups exist already in most Spanish cities (their best-known leader is Señor José María Gil Robles, one of the more irresponsible right-wing politicians of the Second Republic, now a chastened liberal monarchist), but they are composed mainly of lawyers, teachers, and clerks. To win a working-class following, the Christian democrats must convince public opinion that they are as critical as the left of the abuses and injustices of the regime, and as determined to struggle for better living and working conditions. The efforts of the Catholic workers’ organizations in this direction—in competitive collaboration with the socialists—contributed to the wave of industrial unrest which culminated in the Asturian and Basque strikes last May.
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Strikes are illegal in Franco’s Spain, and strikers may be charged with “fomenting rebellion.” All matters affecting industrial relations are supposed to be settled within the bureaucratic sindicatos—the official and only trade unions—to which both workers and employers must pay dues. The system had been under strain since last November when Basque workers at Beasain had demonstrated for higher pay and free trade unions. In May it broke down completely in several of the country’s biggest industries. When the government realized that the strike movement was too massive to crush without a resort to military force that would have wrecked Spain’s hopes of association with the European Economic Community, it authorized employers and strikers to negotiate directly, bypassing the sindicatos if necessary.
Except on the extreme left and extreme right, most Spaniards are now keenly in favor of European integration and Spanish association with—and ultimately membership in—the European Economic Community. Citrus-growers, wine-producers, and the men in charge of the most efficient sectors of the chemical, textile, light engineering, and shipbuilding industries are attracted by the business opportunities afforded by the Common Market, and apprehensive of the economic consequences of exclusion. (The EEC countries and Britain take over 60 per cent of Spain’s exports.) But very many of those who favor Spanish membership in EEC do so for political reasons, confident that a combination of “contagion by example” and discreet pressure from the EEC powers will usher Spain along the path to democracy. When it became known that the Spanish government was considering applying for association, “European” study groups and committees began springing up in every city. The government could not suppress them without discrediting itself in the eyes of EEC, but the Minister of the Interior and the Falange kept a close watch on their activities and speedily reached the conclusion that socialists, liberals, and Christian democrats were using “European” platforms for the propagation of democratic ideas.
In the first week of June the European Movement held an international congress in Munich. Under its auspices delegates from inside Spain—for the most part liberals and Christian democrats—met republican exiles and drafted a joint resolution, which the congress passed unanimously, calling for the restoration of democratic liberties in Spain. A decree was issued in Madrid suspending for two years the theoretical right of Spaniards to live where they please. Spaniards returning from Munich were given the choice between exile and deportation to the Canary Islands. Joaquín Satrústegui and other monarchists of Unión Española (a semi-clandestine liberal group which supports Don Juan) chose the Canary Islands; Gil Robles and other Christian democrats, and several non-monarchist liberals, preferred exile. The Spanish press, obeying government directives, denounced them as Communist dupes; the police made more than one hundred arrests, chiefly of suspected socialists who were, of course, labeled “Communists.” Striking workers were given far rougher treatment than they would have received a month earlier.
The backwoodsmen of the regime appeared to be in the ascendant and Foreign Minister Fernando Castiella, a convinced “European,” informed Franco anxiously that Spain’s chances of acceptance by the European Economic Community were shrinking.
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The July cabinet changes were designed both to reassure European opinion and to ease strains within the regime. In making them General Franco showed all his old skill. The appointment of Fraga Iribarne as Minister of Information was a conciliatory gesture in the direction of the “Europeans” and Catholic Action. Other nominations pleased the army, Opus Dei, and the economic liberals. The Falange lost two of its favorite ministers but was grateful for the retention of José Solís Ruiz, discredited by the May strikes, as “Minister for the Movement” (in charge of Falangist and sindicato affairs) : in return Falange and sindicatos could be expected to be more pliable than ever. Typically, the nomination of General Muñoz Grandes as vice-president gave satisfaction to Falange and monarchists alike. Muñoz Grandes, a wartime admirer of Hitler, was Secretary-General of the Falange in 1939—40; today he is a sick, aging man who commands no troops, has no political following, and is therefore unable either to go into business on his own account or perpetuate a Franco-type regime after the dictator’s death.
But, for all his skill—with the Falange a mere phantom, the sindicatos discredited, the Church cautiously disengaging, the bourgeoisie and the wealthy landowners putting their money on the monarchy, and the workers and intellectuals increasingly defiant—General Franco’s mobile looks perilously unsteady. Its most stable component is the army.
Although Franco could undoubtedly rule, for a while, with the army alone, it is far from certain that the army would wish him to. Many of the younger officers are feeling as restless, politically, as other articulate Spaniards of their generation. They dislike serving on the tribunals which try strikers, student demonstrators, and other political offenders. (Four officers who had—unwillingly—tried a group of Barcelona students were reported recently to have been arrested for communicating details of the trial to foreign newspapermen.) Some senior officers are known to be eager to transform the army into a “normal” nonpolitical force “which the nation will esteem rather than fear.” The younger officers are for the most part “Europeans” and monarchists, favorable to Don Juan. The most influential senior officers, too, have been won over to Don Juan; and although they are less emphatically “European” than their juniors, they are more responsive to the political guidance of the Church, which is an ardent champion of EEC.
In the army, as in other favored but far-sighted sectors of the nation, the European issue is the one likeliest to stimulate a desire for peaceful change. Many officers, like many civilians, fear that their government’s sanctions against the liberals and others who attended the Munich congress—and its silly denunciation of the congress as a “Communist-inspired” gathering—may have jeopardized Spain’s chances of association with EEC. The Six are expected to discuss Spain’s application in the fall (Britain’s must first be cleared out of the way). If, ultimately, they reply in effect: “España sí, Franco no”—which, despite the July facelift and de Gaulle’s desire to facilitate Spain’s “integration with Europe,” is still highly probable—one should not be surprised to learn some morning that a delegation from the officers’ corps, the Church hierarchy, and Don Juan’s privy council has informed Franco politely that his mission is at an end.
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1 Opus Dei and the Jesuits are engaged in a bizarre lutte d’influence the details of which read like a page of 17th-century history. A pro-Jesuit priest summed it up recently. “The Opus thinks it is clever because it has infiltrated its men into key ministerial and civil-service posts. But the confessors of the most influential generals and ministers are Jesuits, and one . . . is worth ten officials.”
2 “Formerly, I admired General Franco as a soldier; today I admire him as a statesman”—President Eisenhower, to the Spanish Foreign Minister. “Please assure General Franco of my deep esteem and affection. His regime—in particular, its great stability—has performed immense services to Europe and the Free World”—President de Gaulle, to the Spanish Foreign Minister.
3 Protestant education and all Protestant publications are banned. Some Protestant groups use books of hymns and psalms printed for them by an underground press in Barcelona. Protestant marriages have no validity, and civil marriages are obtainable only by special ecclesiastical dispensation. Jews, thinner on the ground and therefore considered less likely to corrupt Spanish mores, are regarded more tolerantly, though General Franco has described the Jewish society into which Jesus of Nazareth was born as a “pagan society.”
4 The men who control the Falange and the official unions are, of course, Catholics, as all Falangists must be. But they are not as responsive as Cardinal Pla would like to the social and political guidance of the Church, and they are contemptuous of the parliamentarism and economic liberalism which most Christian democrats favor.
