The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Falange Española, or Spanish Phalanx, had been born in the Comedy Theatre in Madrid on 29 October 1933. It was founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the elder son of the dictator, a young lawyer of dark good looks and supposedly great charm. He attracted a coterie of fascist intellectuals and appealed to students, especially those from wealthy families, the señoritos, as well as many from the lower middle class who felt threatened by social change. The Falange had also been joined by former members of his father’s Patriotic Union from a decade before, as well as frustrated monarchists and conservatives appalled by the electoral victory of the left.

Falangism differed from Nazism and fascism in its profoundly conservative nature. Mussolini used Roman symbols and imperial imagery in his speeches merely for their propaganda effect. The Falange, on the other hand, used modern and revolutionary phraseology while remaining fundamentally reactionary. The Church was the essence of Hispanidad (Spanishness). The new state would ‘draw its inspiration from the spirit of the Catholic religion which is traditional in Spain’. Their symbols were those of Ferdinand and Isabella: the yoke of the authoritarian state and the arrows of annihilation to wipe out heresy. They did not just borrow the symbols, but tried to revive the Castilian mentality. The ideal Falangist was supposed to be ‘half-monk, half-soldier’.

Yet the movement suffered from something of a split personality between the nationalist and the socialist elements. José Antonio attacked ‘the social bankruptcy of capitalism’ and denounced the living conditions of workers and peasants. Yet Marxism he found repugnant as an ideology, because it was not Spanish and because a class struggle weakened the nation. The country had to be united in a system in which the employer could not exploit the employee. At one moment José Antonio was making vain approaches, first to the socialist Prieto, then to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. The next, he was reminding Franco of Oswald Spengler’s remark that in the last resort civilization had always been saved by a platoon of soldiers. But a civilization which has to be saved by soldiers is a conservative’s image of a perfect world, rather than that of a revolutionary national socialist.

The Falange constantly sought more firearms for their street fighting and José Antonio put in motion a Bulldog Drummond-style intrigue. Luis Bolín, the London correspondent of the monarchist ABC, met a prominent but anonymous Englishman by a secret recognition signal in Claridge’s Hotel. They arranged for large quantities of submachine-guns to be packed in champagne cases and shipped from Germany in a private yacht. In fact, they did not arrive in time, but it was not long before Bolínin London began to organize a far more important delivery.

The Falange, however, already had weapons from other sources. On 10 March a Falangist squad led by Alberto Ortega tried to assassinate Professor Luis Jiménez de Asúa, a socialist deputy, but instead killed his police escort. Four days later Falangists made an attempt on Largo Caballero’s life. That same day, 14 March, José Antonio met Franco in the house of the general’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, to discuss a joint plan of action. The following day the Falange was outlawed by the government because of the attack on Largo Caballero and José Antonio was arrested for the illegal possession of arms. It is difficult to reconcile José Antonio’s famous charm with the brutality of his followers and the outspoken racism of his coterie at their dinner-jacketed gatherings in the Hotel Paris. He cannot, in any case, escape responsibility, because his speeches were a clear incitement, even if violence remained an abstract quantity to the fastidious Andalucian.

The ideal of defending traditional Spain required active preparation, now that the authoritarian right had discarded any further attempt to make use of the parliamentary system. In the Pyrenees the Carlists had started to arm and train their requeté militia, famous since the Carlist wars in the nineteenth century for its uniform of a Basque beret in bright red.