The Many Heads of the Hydra: Local Parafascism in Spain and Europe,1936–50

In 1998, Roger Griffin attempted to distil the precise meaning of fascism in the academic literature on the subject. Griffin merged scattered definitions and argued that fascism was a state ideology that promised a desirable lifestyle. Though his work was criticized, his definition nevertheless gained support throughout the 1990s and revitalized the study of fascism from a comparative perspective. He made it possible to define fascism as ideology, to place it within the history of ideas and to study it from a cultural perspective. A clear definition of fascism as ideology, whether Griffin’s populist palingenetic ultranationalism or later Roger Eatwell’s social rebirth based on a holistic-national radical third way, helped to identify examples of fascism across countries and time and to contrast them. At the same time, to delimit fascism meant to exclude cases that were similar but did not quite meet the precise definition. Vichy France, Francoist Spain, and Metaxasist Greece, for instance, failed to meet the criteria. Strictly speaking, those regimes were cases of parafascism and not fascism. ²

Criticism of the 1990s Griffin consensus focused on the idealism and ahistoricism of research. Robert Paxton argued that it treated fascism in isolation and failed to understand how it changed and evolved in relation to other political movements. In reference to the cultural history of Italian fascism, Richard Bosworth maintained that the consensus centred heavily on the hyperbole of political leaders and isolated mass acts, but said little about how everyday Italians regarded Mussolini’s dictatorship and dealt with fascism. ³

Aristotle Kallis argued that the Griffin consensus and its critics produced two broad, opposing outlooks. The first highlighted the intellectual and cultural history of fascism as a coherent system of ideas across countries and time; the second highlighted the social and political history of fascism as concrete lived experience under dictatorial rule from 1914 to 1945, a period of extended civil war in Europe. The problem with this division was that it assumed that the two outlooks were mutually exclusive, that ideas about fascism that guided one approach could not be useful to the other and vice versa.

Although it is early to speak of a new consensus, a mixed approach has replaced the old dichotomy. Yet while improved, it too has overlooked the role played by parafascism. The work of historians to define fascism in Germany, in Italy, and in select political milieus – to consolidate the Phoenix – has fostered a growth of comparative studies on fascism in Romania, England, Sweden, and elsewhere, but has turned parafascism into a conceptual ragbag, a thousand-headed beast, the Hydra of Lerna. ⁴ Historians have not defined parafascism by what it was, positively, but by what it was not, negatively. The following is taken from Griffin:

[T]o a greater or lesser extent, a number of autocratic conservative régimes deliberately aped some of the superficial aspects of the Fascist and Nazi apparatus and style of power … In these cases, although the façade of national regeneration was maintained, the State, as the representative of the interests of the traditional ruling hierarchy, repressed rather than encouraged those aspects of fascism which it rightly saw as life-threatening, such as the mobilisation of populist nationalism, the emergence of new élites through a genuine social revolution, or the diffusion of a heroic, tendentially pagan world view incompatible with the strictures of Christian orthodoxy. ⁵

When defined in the negative, parafascism’s utility is diminished. Rather than a tool to unravel features that were a common and widespread political response in the 1914–45 period, scholars have treated the concept as an inseparable adjunct to an apparently pure fascism, as if fascism were the natural, teleological end. Since we no longer see fascism as incomplete democratization, we should not see parafascism as failed fascistization either. In reality, neither movement followed a fixed path. Instead, what European societies faced were similar challenges to which they gave different responses. ⁶

Whether Francoism was fascist, conservative, or authoritarian was a discussion that went back to the 1970s and figured prominently in the new scholarship of the 1990s. Though historians could not agree on a common understanding, many sided with the view that Francoism was a form of fascistized dictatorship. Ismael Saz agreed with Griffin’s analysis but emphasized two aspects that Griffin did not develop in depth. The first was to see fascistization as a roundtrip. Emilio Gentile holds that what Nazi Germany and especially fascist Italy showed was that fascists did not seize power and instantly disseminate fascist ideology, but rather that they introduced it piecemeal through a mythic liturgy of permanent revolution. The speed of the process could be adjusted, stopped or even reversed, as the parafascists or fascistizing dictatorships proved. The second was to argue that fascistization influenced the non-fascist right, which once fascistized won many of the Franco regime’s early internal fights. Through Saz, many historians stressed the fascistization of non-fascist conservatives and distinguished the frequently opposing aims of fascists, conservatives, and those who had been fascistized. They emphasized that a conflictive conservative coalition sustained the dictatorship; Francoism was built upon the defeated fascist party and ‘the success of clearly fascistized sectors of the traditional elite’. ⁷

In the 1990s, with the advent of scholarship on political repression, the role of gender, popular opinion, and on the effects of autarky on daily life, focus was also given to local institutions and politicians. Local histories sparked debate on how Francoism transformed political elites and whether elites broke from or joined the Franco regime. Broadly speaking, the scholarship of the debate could be divided into two schools of thought: rupturist and continuist. The rupturist school argued that local Francoist institutions created new elites and mimicked fascist countries in how they organized local government. The continuist school argued that traditional elites and their clientelar networks shaped local powers and submerged themselves within a state patronage system that was headed by a unified national party. The former viewed Francoism as fascist and the latter as conservative. ⁸

Though the debate generated independent empirical data, it was little more than a twist on the larger discussion on the classification of Francoism. The rupturist–continuist debate was counterproductive because, first, it obsessed over Spanish historiography on Francoism and developed ‘a high degree of intellectual autarky in conceptualizing fascism’, as Griffin put it. In other words, the debate fattened out rather than grew up. Second, the debate glutted the field with descriptive studies, whose apparently objective research into local realities aimed to bolster a collective narrative, but instead fragmented it into regional focuses. If previously the hydra had a few heads, it now had as many heads as regions of Spain. Third, the most structuralist studies referenced copious amounts of quantitative data on the Spanish Traditionalist Phalanx of the JONS (Falange Española Tradicionalista de las JONS, FET-JONS) drawn from the archives of city halls, provincial governments, and FET-JONS branch offices. ⁹ This static statistical approach tended to equate Francoism to German and Italian fascism. It argued that like fascist Germany and Italy, Francoist Spain depended on local coalitions of conservatives and interclass sectors such as the peasantry, whose historic mission was to quash reformists and to oppose revolutionary social movements. ¹⁰

Instead, Antonio Costa Pinto argued that fascism and parafascism differed in how they perceived political power, saw government in relation to the single party, and viewed the link between the party and society. Kallis agreed with Pinto, arguing that:

the crucial factor is to what extent the fascist component emancipated itself from the initial predominance of its traditional conservative sponsors and to what degree it departed – once in power – from conventional forms/objectives of policy-making towards a more radical direction. ¹¹

According to Kallis, fascist-era regimes accepted fascism either voluntarily, preventatively, or as a last resort. Which of these paths a society chose to take, how its traditional elites assimilated fascism, and how it responded to the social, political, and cultural crises that it faced conditioned the kind of dictatorship that eventually emerged. ¹²

In The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1945, William Sheridan Allen examined the importance of the local level to the Nazi Party. Allen assessed the party’s strength and the causes for its success by the late 1920s, namely that national leaders permitted provinces to act independently, in effect constituting a movement from below. The strategy was so successful that by 1930–2, half of the Nazi membership in provinces came from towns with populations of less than 10,000 people. Rudy Koshar agreed that ‘small and middle-sized communities were crucial to Nazi success’. Top-down political history dominated Spanish historiography of fascism for decades and microanalyses like Allen’s and Koshar’s were rare. Not until the early 1990s did analyses of Francoism in provinces appear, and then grow exponentially. These offered up valuable data on the Spanish Falange (Falange Española, FE) and the FET-JONS, yet their attitudes about the regime influenced their understanding of the party. In many instances, interpretations were pessimistic and projected features of the dictatorship – its archaism, Catholicism, and race policies – on the FE-JONS. ¹³

The shift of interest in the 1990s forked into two branches. A branch focusing on cultural and intellectual history demonstrated that a wide variety of illiberal political cultures, including a modern, palingenetic, secular version of fascism, influenced Francoism. From 1936 to 1939, it was still possible to separate fascist ideology and national Catholicism. Zira Box argued that while the former was a political religion, a secular faith in the rebirth of the nation, the latter was politicized religion, a sacred redemption with God as canopy. For national Catholics, nation and God were inseparable; the nation had to be ‘subordinate and absolutely loyal to God’. Both the role of the institutional Church and of Catholics in the regimen highlights the politization of religion, a phenomenon that some authors have called clerical Fascism. However, in the last years there has been a growing acceptance of the idea that Francoism included both aspects – a Fascist political religion and a National-Catholic politicised religion – in which the first became increasingly irrelevant. ¹⁴

The other branch focused on a sociological understanding of Falange membership in cities and towns. If the cultural-intellectual branch showed that there was a strong affinity between Spanish and European fascism, studies by José Antonio Parejo and others showed that pre-war recruitment into the Falange occurred similar to elsewhere in Europe. FE-JONS swelled during the Popular Front’s electoral victory in 1936. In Seville between the February 1936 elections and the July 1936 coup d’etat, the number of Falangists doubled. Seville was the severest case, however membership rose throughout Franco-held Spain from the start of the Civil War (see Figure 1). Far from a party of the well-heeled, the FE-JONS comprised many classes, including workers, day labourers, and peasants (see Figure 2). In both rural and urban areas, interclass support grew in 1936, with a slight tilt towards upper-class support in urban centres (see Figure 3). Richard Hamilton claims that the dynamic was similar in Germany. ¹⁵ OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 2.

Socio-occupational breakdown of the FE-JONS in rural areas, 1936.

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Figure 3.

Socio-occupational breakdown of FE and FET-JONS in urban areas, 1936 and 1939.

These statistics raise doubts about the apparent peculiarities of Spanish fascism and demonstrate that the FE-JONS was on course to becoming a weighty organization in the Second Spanish Republic. However, a close look at the numbers shows that FE-JONS growth from February to July 1936 was unequal across Spain. When the Popular Front government outlawed the FE-JONS as a party, the party went underground and concealed its records, severely straining quantification of FE-JONS activity in that period. In Palencia, for example, the FE-JONS spread into 40 towns but comprised, officially, only 450 members. The figures for Málaga were similar. In Cantabria where fascism took root in the agricultural sector, the city of Santander had 600 Blue Shirts, or Falangists. The numbers in these provinces were far from the numbers in Seville, while in other provinces, such as in Ciudad Real, the FE-JONS scarcely existed. The statistics also show that despite FE-JONS growth in universities and other middle-class realms, the growth of FE-JONS support in Spain, as in Portugal and Romania, drew on deep patronage networks and clientelism. Carlos Gil Andrés estimated that in La Rioja, just a few hundred Falangists sustained the movement and that their strategy of mobilization and expansion mirrored the traditional war cry of nearby Álava and Navarra. All told, the FE-JONS expanded across Spain, but not enough to constitute a movement from below that could destabilize the political order and force the traditional elite to capitulate. On the contrary, the traditional elites conducted a military coup d’état whose failure resulted in a bloody civil war. ¹⁶

The war changed everything. The first few months of it saw horrifying bloodshed in the rearguard of both Republicans and Nationalists and radically altered political values. In Nationalist-held territory, the FE-JONS swelled into a mass organization whose support across the country was highly uneven (see Figure 4 and Table 1). In 1940, most Falange members came from traditional Carlist areas and from where combat was starkest. The civil war fascistized conservatives. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Table 1.

FET-JONS in Provinces (1940–9)

	1940		1949			1940		1949
	Members	% pop.	Members	% pop.		Members	% pop.	Members	% pop.
Álava	2756	2.44	3271	2.77	Lugo	8345	1.63	8743	1.72
Alicante	11,936	1.96	18,725	2.95	Madrid	24,668	1.56
Almería	22,008	6.12	18,806	5.26	Navarra	46,102	12.47	73,760	19.26
Barcelona	40,491	2.09	47,698	2.14	Salamanca	13,894	3.56	14,556	3.53
Burgos	22,034	5.82	24,270	6.11	Santander	24,507	6.22	20,800	5.14
Cuenca	6961	2.09	10,428	3.10	Valencia	28,640	2.28	28,098	2.08
Logroño	21,370	9.66	13,399	5.83	Zaragoza	41,189	6.92	38,593	6.21

Source: AGA (General Archive of the Government), Presidential, DNP 51-20509 and 51-20742 to 51-20752 and INE (National Statistics Institute) census data, 1940 and 1949. Created by author.

Nationalist concerns centred on the Civil War as a religious crusade and on one leader, Franco, as the Generalissimo and Caudillo of the Nationalist movement. Franco seized control of the military and asserted his political supremacy. In December 1936, he issued a decree to militarize Nationalist militias, and on 19 April 1937 he issued a second decree to rally Falangists and traditionalists under a single organization that he controlled, the FET-JONS. Although the unification of the two groups was a tactical success, in reality they did not always get along. The FET-JONS were more a state party than a fascist movement. In 1941, the provincial leader for Navarra, a mostly traditionalist province, described the local membership as follows:

Even though they are loyal to the Organization, they don’t forget their previous ideology, which they believe is integral to our unification. They choose not to follow some of the things we respect … They treat the Party with respect, but without love. They act loyally … but nothing more. ¹⁷

Some historians have argued that the unification of conservatives that led to the coup d’etat and of the FET-JONS produced a coalition through which the FE-JONS were able to seize power. Other historians claim that unification symbolized a pact between peasants, the urban bourgeoisie, and the political establishment. These theses are dubious. If we can agree with Paxton that to historicize fascism means to analyze its relationships with conservative and liberal forces, then the FET-JONS did not gain access to government – let alone seize power – because the traditional elites were weak, as they were in Germany and Italy. Instead, the unification of the FET-JONS and conservatives was a show of force by Franco, who commandeered and used the FET-JONS for his ends. Spanish fascists had little choice but to accept Franco’s decree. In France, the situation was similar. Peasant protests of a corporatist, proto-fascist nature and the terror that the middle classes experienced in the face of the Popular Front, ripped apart the Third Republic because the two social classes could not reconcile their differences and work together in a common political space. By selectively co-opting them from above, the Vichy regime alone was able to reunite them. ¹⁸

Dionisio Ridruejo maintains that the unification of the FET-JONS was a coup d’etat in reverse. With a hint of irony, this view holds that a quick invasion of the state by the single party was how fascists, naturally, seized power. Though the March on Rome and mass rallies in Nuremberg were long in gestation and complicated affairs, perceptions of these events as automatic or inevitable have fuelled the argument. Yet in Germany and Italy, conservatives and fascists first aligned and found ways to coexist before fascists seized power. In Germany the process was quick, and in Italy it was slow. In Portugal, similarly, conservatives and fascists aligned during the military dictatorship of 1926 to 1933, though the Estado Novo repressed and selectively incorporated the fascists. In Spain after April 1937, Falangists pushed to accelerate the state’s fascistization, however it was not until the end of the Civil War that the real struggle took place, especially at the local level and in the areas of culture and propaganda. ¹⁹

German and Italian fascism differed in many ways. In Germany state fascistization occurred over months, while in Italy it was built up over years. In Germany the Nazi Party superseded the state, while in Italy it was the other way around. Emilio Gentile has argued that even during Italy’s peak totalitarian acceleration in the 1930s, the state overruled the Italian National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF). Italian fascism can be divided into two rival tendencies that animated the project: a fascisticizing/authoritarian tendency that held sway in the 1920s and a fascist/totalitarian tendency that prevailed in the 1930s. A similar dynamic was evident in other European countries. Julie Thorpe contends that Austria was a fascist dictatorship because it gradually fascistized conservative politicians and policies in education, propaganda and national identity. Portuguese historians maintain that António de Oliveira Salazar mildly fascisticized Portugal in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A number of historians claim that Spain was fascist from 1939 to 1945. Fascistization in Spain was managed by the national government and was noticeable in legislation and in the creation of such organizations as the Youth Front (Frente de Juventudes) and the Welfare Service (Auxilio Social) until 1941, when the government interrupted the process. The Spanish dictatorship hindered political solutions at the local level that aimed at fascistization, and buried corruption and traditional patronage networks within the state and single party. ²⁰

Those who hold that local Francoist power was fascist point out that cities and towns lost electoral representation and were subjected to centralist, interventionist policies in economic and administrative affairs. This undermined the influence of local elites, as it did in Italy as well. Yet centralization and a lack of electoral representation also occur in other forms of political dictatorship and do not equate to fascistization. Phillip Morgan shows that in many instances fascists were not centralists. Authoritarian conservatives and even liberals, as French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier exemplified in 1939, also adopted centralist measures. Indeed, historically centralism has had more to do with administrative traditions and political contingencies than fascism. Depending on how centralism was applied, it could slow or even stop fascistization. ²¹

Despite the strongly homogenizing tendencies of the Nazis, their administration of the ‘inferior peoples’ to the east contrasted starkly with how local institutions were managed in the Netherlands, France, or Norway. Nazi policy in Western Europe also changed depending on Nazi Party respect of conquered peoples, whether the party viewed the territory as Germanic, how it fit in to the new Nazi order, and how generally the military occupation played out. Alliances with the Nazis and the rifts that they produced created highly differentiated situations. In Luxembourg, the Nazis imposed a system of local administration that mimicked Germany’s as a preliminary step towards annexation. However in Norway, the Nazis remained more aloof and shared executive power with Minister-President Vidkun Quisling, whom they empowered to interpret legislation in accordance with local medieval traditions. ²² Austria and Luxembourg were unique, albeit similar, cases. In Austria as a result of the Anschluss and proximity to Germany, the Nazi Party played a more active role in local life than in Germany. Similarly in Luxembourg, Nazi Party members acted with great freedom at the local level despite difficulties recruiting native Luxembourgers to occupy civil service positions. In Germany, Nazi permissiveness of local autonomy was contingent upon a faithful implementation of Nazi policy at the local level and broke down in 1935. In areas the Nazis considered Germanic and had targeted for Nazification, local Nazi Parties were bolstered by Berlin. ²³

In other collaborationist regimes and in the dictatorships of southern Europe, fascist parties were less prominent at the local level. Nico Wouters argues that Belgium was an intermediate and paradoxical case. Though the Flemish National Union (Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond, VNV) was strong in Flemish Belgium, the Belgian fascist party, the Rex, was weak throughout Belgium. Neither party positioned itself as a catalyst for Nazi change. What the Nazis did instead was fill city halls with new recruits from both parties early on, before 1940. The war then distanced local institutions from the Belgian national government and the Nazis pushed through key policies by negotiating directly with the provincial and municipal levels of government. In Belgium, fragmented, decentralized power played into the hands of the Nazis. The Nazis merely substituted old mayors with Rex and VNV members. Far from homogenizing the occupation, the Nazis increased Belgium’s decentralized structure. Conversely, strict hierarchical rule in France hindered the efforts of Germanophiles in the first few months of Vichy. Thanks to a traditional preference for centralization, regional prefects could obstruct local fascists even if cities’ reduced scope of action limited the effectiveness of prefects.

These general (lack of) reforms of local government, led to two distinct specific contradictions in both countries: in Belgium, the policy of centralisation only increased localisation, while in France the policy of trying to reduce municipal government to a purely executive administrative level only served to decrease its efficiency. ²⁴

In the 1920s, similar administrative traditions played important parts in Italy and Portugal. In Italy, prefects worked to hinder the ambitions of squadristi leaders and many fascists were hostile to centralism. Radical sectors of the PNF developed anti-statist sentiments and challenged the national authorities at the local and provincial levels. Indeed all across fascist Europe, conflict typified relations between the party and state in towns, municipalities, and provinces. Since party-state relations in Spain were no exception, some historians fit Francoism into the same fascist mould. ²⁵ Instead, regional conflicts and their resolutions depended on four factors: (1) the weight and size of the party’s dictatorship at the local level, (2) the dictator’s skill in commanding party subordinates, (3) the dictator’s ideological outlook and relations with other political bodies, and (4) regional culture and traditions.

In northern Italy after the March on Rome, the PNF managed to win the support of strategic organizations and leaders, even if they questioned Benito Mussolini’s dominance on occasion. At first, Mussolini shared power with conservative elites. He used the PNF to destroy Italy’s old liberal class and then empowered the civil service and prefecture to crush resistance from radicals in the party. Though conservatives dominated prefectures in the 1920s, the national party secretary between 1926 and 1930, Augusto Turati, forged an entente between the PNF and state at the provincial level. However, this situation changed gradually in the 1930s. ‘On the ground, the restoration of the authority and prestige of the prefects was only made possible by the massive reshaping of the membership, cadres, organization and methods of the provincial party by Farinacci’s successor, Augusto Turati’. ²⁶

Rather, in Germany the Nazi Party wiped away the old Bismarckian system and foisted in its place a volatile, polycratic regime that tended towards radicalism. Between 1933 and 1935, the party and state were blurred, with the party, if anything, predominating slightly. Anthony McElligott contends that Adolf Hitler used the German civil service and traditional bureaucratic elites to prevent excessive decentralization. Richard Evans points out that Hitler installed a strict hierarchy that did away with Weimar’s organization of local institutions, but preserved a certain level of autonomy inherited from an older tradition of federalism. In any event, the Nazi Party overruled state authorities in the daily lives of towns and neighbourhoods, even if civil servants effectively ran regional institutions. Often struggles were not between Nazis and conservatives, but between different centres of power within the party. ²⁷

In Portugal, meanwhile, the civic body that worked to unify Salazar’s supporters, the National Union (União Nacional), recycled traditional elites and placed them in a party overlooked by the state and the state’s district representatives. The organization of local institutions under Salazar and the National Union resembled more the model of Miguel Primo de Rivera, Franco’s dictatorial predecessor, and his Patriotic Union than Franco’s rule. Unlike Franco, Salazar distanced fascists from power and repressed the most militant groups. Franco bequeathed the Falange positions of influence, powerbases, and operational space in which to manoeuvre. Salazar granted none of these liberties to the Portuguese National Syndicalist Movement (Movimento Nacional-Sindicalista), though he did empower the Portuguese Legion (Legião) and Portuguese Youth (Mocidade). ²⁸

Norway under Nazi occupation mirrored the situations in Spain and Portugal. Hitler made the weak National Unification (Nasjonal Samling, NS) Norway’s dictatorial party and supporters from a variety of other parties quickly swelled its ranks. Though Nazi laws in Norway did not require mayors to be members of the NS, the Ministry of Interior gradually filled keys posts in city halls with NS members beginning in 1941. Though most appointees were not members of the NS prior to the occupation, they were recruited on the basis of administrative skill and experience. When NS radicals conflicted with mayors, as they did frequently, their complaints were routinely ignored by governors and party comrades. ²⁹

Local conflicts spread like wildfire across postwar Spain. Generally, the most pitched battles occurred between FET-JONS provincial leaders and provincial governors over the designations of city hall staff. Provincial governors held the upper hand in this because they alone could appoint staff. As with the NS in Norway, the FET-JONS could only advise. Since the military and old-guard politicians were appointed as governors throughout the Civil War until early 1939, FET-JONS protest surfaced early on. Indeed, provinces overlooked FET-JONS interests to such an extent that during a moment of tension between the two forces, the Ministry of Interior was compelled to issue a circular urging governors to warn FET-JONS leaders of potential sanctions of high-ranking party supporters before the governors took action. The ministry wanted the FET-JONS to discipline internally before it risked doing damage to its public reputation. ³⁰

Historians since then have interpreted the power struggle as a fight of the FET-JONS against the traditional right. The FET-JONS strategy bore a close resemblance to the fascist attack on mayors as moribund, corrupt, and inefficient in Belgium. The FET-JONS provincial head of Alicante reported a number of mayors for obstructing the party’s activities and demanded that irregular appointments to executive bodies (comisiones gestoras) be replaced. When his protest was met with silence, the Falange denounced grave irregularities in the supply chain and generally stepped up criticism. In cacique-dominated Aragon, governors and Falange leaders clashed fiercely in Zaragoza and Teruel over FET-JONS ostracism from government. Similarly in Cuenca, Almería, Lugo, Granada, and Albacete, the Falange spoke out against ancestral cacique rule. The aim of the FET-JONS was not to put an end to irregularities, but to discredit and destroy its political adversaries. When governments replaced local executives with appointees who were not the candidates of choice of the Falange, the Falange redoubled its efforts, pushing to merge the position of governor and FET-JONS provincial leader into one title. ³¹

From city halls to the provincial level to the Ministry of Interior – from bottom to top – such political wrangling was everyday reality in Spain due to the many power struggles at the local level. The Falange viewed these battles as integral to its interests and identity, and depicted them as fights between fascists and coercive reactionaries. The FET-JONS fought to consolidate positions of authority as a means to power, to designate Falangists as provincial governors who could see to Falange interests at the local level, and to intensify state fascistization along Italian lines. Antonio Cazorla Sánchez argues that the main problem with this strategy and how it has been interpreted was that caciques joined the Falange and used it to continue old struggles in a country whose dominant political culture was factionalism, as was true as well in Italy and Portugal. In Ángela Cenarro’s words:

often new Falangists were connected to the old political elite through family ties or affection, even if they were not members of that elite. In many cases, rural vertical solidarities disguised strong dependencies of the weak on the very powerful. ³²

While some fascists did push for state fascistization, the disparate footing of the FET-JONS in government, its political weakness, internal rivalries among leaders after Franco restructured the organization and the persistence of a political culture based on patronage throughout Spain turned Falange-government conflict into more than an Italian-style competition for power. In the end, the only way to dissipate the conflict was to adopt the FET-JONS solution: to unify Falange and government representation in cities and provinces. Despite the wishes of Roberto Farinacci, a leading Italian fascist politician, this was not even possible in Italy until the Salò Republic. Many historians believe that this strategy, which became de facto but not de jure policy, together with a degree of political turnover in city halls, meant that the Falange had successfully fascisticized the local civil service. This is an exaggeration. Provincial Falange leaders who had denounced irregularities and political corruption did not become governors. Not even moderate Falangists secured positions of importance. Rather, provincial governors were drawn from the ranks of jurists and career military officials, many of whom were not fascists initially but nevertheless took over control of the fascist party. Typically, unification was test run first in provinces where the Falange was strong and its leaders were charismatic, such as in Seville, Santander, and Valladolid. The aim was to appease and quiet fascists more than it was to empower them. Once the dictatorship had managed to fuse Falange leaders and provincial governors, even the most minor public dissent could be pre-empted. In this period, FET-JONS briefs and reports filled with monotonous statistics and triumphal declarations. Any discord between governors and fascist leaders was grounds for immediate dismissal. On occasion, local FET-JONS sub-groups such as the Youth Front and National Syndical Central (Central Nacional Sindicalista, CNS) did criticize mayors, and to a lesser extent provincial governors, but the complaints were filtered through non-official channels and kept hush-hush. Except on special occasions, the Falange abandoned any dynamic role it may have played and became a parallel bureaucracy. In June 1943, the provincial head for the province of León asked rhetorically:

How is this mass membership useful? … Because the whole business is a farce. [The membership] doesn’t support us morally. At best, we must see them as mere sympathizers. ³³

The unification of provincial posts also helped to refashion a new model of state clientelism. With each province now in the hands of an individual, the dictatorship could complete the single-party rule that Primo de Rivera had wanted to establish, and it effectively concealed the factional fighting that raged in the centre of government. The new leaders at once subdued the Falange and manoeuvred their patronage networks into the new framework of relations. They ensured that established networks and new arrivals of Falangists coexisted peacefully, or at least that disagreements were waged privately rather than publicly. As in Portugal, immediate needs determined how the many local interests were either integrated into or rejected from the new network of relations and attitudes. Technocrats and professionals played a key role in smoothing the wrinkles of the new model by acting as intermediaries between the government and traditional elites. The model was implemented in Spain in 1947 through the 1945 Law on Local Government Guidelines, which enabled the new government to rotate mayors on a continual basis and institutionalized clientelism in professional colleges and the national union bureaucracy. ³⁴ Kallis argues that the mixture of old and new produced a version of parafascism at the local level that brought in some fascists but mostly supported old conservatives. Unlike fascism, parafascism could be open about its links to the old political order and was a better guarantee of continuity and stability. Kallis writes:

Voluntary fascistization, based on the appropriation of selective fascist commodities from above and within, ensured a higher degree of continuity and stability with minimal risk of any shift of power away from the traditional centres of power; yet the new veneer could not mask the uninterrupted continuities with the past, flawed political system. ³⁵

The resultant concentration of political decision-making in the hands of mayors and governors was, in effect, a caudilloization of power. ³⁶ Norway showed that caudilloization did not necessarily mean that local institutions headed straight down a path to fascism, though government could be radicalized depending on the local leaders that higher-ups handpicked for positions of responsibility. In practice, caudilloization meant that at the municipal level, councillors were figureheads and that real power resided with mayors. The flexibility of caudilloization meant that where fascism was strong, the system could endorse local leanings and leaders, as long as they supported the dictatorship, while other areas of the country might have had an altogether different feel to them. By accepting parafascism as a framework, it becomes possible to envision simultaneous political, regional, and temporal – both fascisticizing and defascisticizing – alignments. In the medium term, parafascism did not fascisticize Spanish society, but it homogenized and rallied support for the dictatorship across the country (see Figure 2 and Table 1). In December 1940, the FET-JONS estimated its membership at 996,389, without counting Guipúzcoa and Spanish Morocco. Nine years later, the numbers had changed little, with a count of 866,434, excluding Madrid, Morocco, Oviedo, and Seville. ³⁷

The strength of caudilloized parafascism was that it could manage fascistizing and defascistizing governors and mayors at the same time. An important factor in this was the military, which in the 1940s was omnipresent in Spain. Although real political power resided with the governors, it still behoved them not to contravene the desires of top military officials. Governors also had to treat local notables, who were connected to the national government and could call for a governor’s dismissal if they were unsatisfied, with great care. Finally, governors were watchful of the bureaucracies that worked for them, both of the FET-JONS and of the state, as well as the Catholic Church, though to a lesser extent. All told, the model’s flexibility and ability to balance a complex of forces was similar to the structuring of municipal institutions in Norway in 1940. Baard H. Borge explains:

We should … ask what happened after the NS’ Führer principle had been implemented in counties and municipalities. If one compares NS-controlled municipalities across counties and regions a diverse picture emerges, i.e., practices varied a great deal, depending on the new mayor’s personality and on his relationship to other Norwegian and German authorities within the county. ³⁸

We can establish who the Spanish caudillos were by looking at the body of officials that ran city halls from 1939 to 1947. Our understanding of the caudillos has grown in the historiography of the Franco period thanks to a good preservation of many lists and records on the occupations, political affiliations in 1936, ages, etc. of municipal councillors in FET-JONS and Ministry of Interior archives. Unfortunately, many recent studies that have used this data have focused heavily on quantification and have rarely interpreted information critically. The data was almost always conditioned by political interests and by persons who later tampered with records. Records contain errors, inaccuracies, and generalizations. In 1948 FET-JONS reports, for example, most responses to questions on the political membership of municipal councillors in 1936 indicate that their respondents were rightists at the time rather than members of a particular party. It was not that in 1948 the authorities wanted to hide the 1936 affiliations of councillors, it was that by then the only relevant information was to be a rightist, not a Falangist, a conservative, or anything else. In 1948, the FET-JONS divided political affiliations into three crude categories: red, rightist (or supporter of the current order), and Old Shirt. The Old Shirts were pre-war Falangists and their numbers were almost certainly exaggerated.

In addition to deciphering party affiliations in records, it is difficult to determine occupations. In 1940, to distinguish a farmhand from a farmer or a peasant from a landowner was an arduous task. Many town councillors appear in records as lawyers, doctors, or engineers, but may have also been landowners or industrialists. A worker who said he was a miner may have also worked as an agricultural day labourer and a bricklayer’s assistant. Until the 1960s, the Spanish labour market was highly unstable and imprecise.

The database the author created for this article contains data on 1770 town councillors in the province of Almería, 794 for the period 1939–45 and 976 for the period 1946–50. Though the sample is more complete for the latter period, the database as a whole is representative of the kind of data the government collected and is similar to databases that historians have created for other provinces of Spain. ³⁹

*

Only half of towns are factored into this category.

Source: AHPAl (Historical Archive of the Province of Almería). Gobierno Civil. Comisiones Gestoras. AGA (Historical Archive of the Administration). Interior, Comisiones Gestoras. Archivos Municipales de (Municipals Archives of) Alhama, Alicún, Almócita, Alsodux, Antas, Arboleas, Bayarque, Beires, Benahadux, Benínar, Oria and Viator. Created by author.

The problem with occupational data is that it is misleading. In reality, farmers and farmhands only became city councillors significantly in towns with populations of less than 5000 (see Table 2). The Franco regime did not favour radicalized farmers or peasants, who represented barely 7.92 per cent of councillors of large cities. The regime favoured professionals, intellectuals, landowners, and industrialists. Cities were dominated by the economically and bureaucratically powerful. The upper and middle classes even dominated the countryside well beyond the numbers they represented there. While Almería in 1940 consisted of 103 towns of which just 14 contained more than 5000 residents, the majority 89 small towns contained comparatively few councillors drawn from the lower classes. This throws into question the degree of interclassism among town and city councillors.

As for mayors, they too were drawn overwhelmingly from the professional classes (see Figure 5). A look at the data shows that jurists and notaries mostly became councillors in cities with populations over 10,000. ⁴¹ In towns with populations between 1000 and 5000 mayors were drawn from more diverse backgrounds, though only 12.99 per cent came from the peasantry, against 58.44 per cent from the professions and landowning classes. Even in towns, the regime preferred mayors who were landowners and professionals. In all, scarcely 5 per cent of mayors were from the lower classes. This not only challenges the view that Francoism was as interclassist as some Spanish historians have claimed, but also that the regime conceded significant power to the lower and lower middle classes at the local level. ⁴² OPEN IN VIEWER

At the same time, the data helps explain why councillors were not politically active in 1936. Judges and notaries were forbidden from joining political parties, and teachers and other professionals were prohibited from becoming mayors or councillors due to an 1877 Municipalities Law that regulated elections and remained in force throughout the Second Republic. Since the Francoists wished to conceal connections to the preceding political order, they sought out persons without obvious political histories, such as professionals and brothers, cousins, brothers-in-law and sons-in-law of traditional elites, as well as sharecroppers who were loyal to their landowners. The outward appearance of these recruits was clean (see Figure 6), yet they were not apolitical and had filtered through the same kinds of family and patronage networks, professional organizations, sports clubs, and lodges that ensured they shared common values and attitudes about politics and religion. ⁴³ OPEN IN VIEWER

The Civil War also significantly replenished those in power. While the war depoliticized broad sectors of the population that only wanted peace and a return to normalcy, it also radicalized such groups as the victims of reprisals or families that had suffered persecutions at the hands of Republicans and had become staunch supporters of Franco. In areas where Republican forces prevailed for most of the war, to have been a resister, a fifth columnist, or a prisoner guaranteed access to city halls in the postwar period. The war generated its own social networks and political identifications, which played important roles after the war. In Franco-held territories, ex-combatants, mostly adolescents and young men, entered the civil service and found employment in city halls in great numbers in 1940–1. Ángel Alcalde, or Jordi Rubio, argues that new faces in the civil service faced a class hierarchy that was more or less rigid depending on their connections to family, class, and traditional elites. These qualitative rather than quantitative considerations help us understand how newcomers and senior politicians learned to share power both formally and informally, and how the dictatorship defeated early infighting and won out over the old order. ⁴⁴

The data in the graphs show that rather than put an end to caciquism, Francoism perfected it by shrouding and slipping it into the civil service. Provincial governors prioritized the recruitment of public notaries and attorneys, experienced professionals who had intimate family and class ties to landowners, and other traditional authorities and who were well positioned to run government and the legal system. This was true both at the local and national levels, and within the Spanish Trade Union Organization, commonly called the Vertical Syndicate. Cristóbal Gómez Benito’s analysis of agrarian policy and rural society in early Francoism concludes:

the great delegation of power to the bureaucratic elite and its total individual and collective ideological identification with the Francoist regime was key to the regime’s success … The bureaucratic elite consisted of highly qualified technocrats who could steer the activities of individual ministries and whose positions, especially in the agricultural sector, involved a conflict of interest … They were also specialists in the law. ⁴⁵

The choice of public notaries was strategic because often they came from other areas besides the jurisdictions for which they were responsible. Their role was to facilitate understanding between rival rightwing families and factions. They were entrusted to act as distant third parties who could draw together old and new patronage networks, the civil service, and the FET-JONS.

A common challenge faced by fascism and parafascism was how to transition a liberal political order to a society of the masses. Both adopted aggressive dictatorial formulas that physically wiped out revolutionary and reform-minded citizens, their political movements, and their organizations from public space. Though ideology played a key part, it alone was not what distinguished the two movements. The specific challenges that the societies of each type of rule confronted, and the balance of power in them, were also significant. In fascist and parafascist dictatorships, there were a mix of fascists, conservatives, and even liberals whose evolution one way or the other depended on the balance of forces and how well managing elites assimilated subordinates, manipulated factions, and guided the overall project. In the end, the difference was a matter of degree.

Even within parafascism itself there were opposing tendencies. The gulf was wide between those who cooperated openly with fascism and sought fascistizing solutions and those who, despite some imitation or collaboration, impeded the work of fascists. We understand how parafascism operated the more we analyse its evolution, alliances, and circumstances at the local level. Local Francoism was a version of parafascism that was similar to the structure of power in Portugal and resembled aspects of the regimes in France, Norway, and even fascist Italy. More comparative studies of local parafascism can help us understand the ideology on its own terms, in its full diversity, and distinguish its particular version of dictatorship from those of pure fascism and conservatism.

A look at local Francoist institutions in the context of the wider debate on the nature of fascism shows that there is a need to rethink the dictatorships of the European Civil War, not so much from the point of departure of the German and Italian experiences, but the many meanders – the political dynamics at the local level in Spain, Portugal, Austria, France, Greece, and others – that truly defined fascist-era Europe. Analyses of local dynamics in other European dictatorships could deepen our understanding of how traditional elites and fascists defended common interests and supported the dictatorships of their countries. Furthermore, transnational research centred on microhistory is a way to combine the dominant intellectual-cultural and political-social schools of thought on fascism.

In the Spanish case, as it happens in other Parafascist regimes, it shows a re-adaptation of the traditional elites’ systems of domination based on two elements: Fascist techniques of repression and cooptation, and the use of the state bureaucratic channels by traditional patronage networks. The combination of both repression and nepotism mostly invalidated the timid policies of social cooptation, and eventually generated both political cynicism and popular demobilisation. Combined with the lack of valid political alternatives, the only option left to the majority was accommodation, regardless of the degree of identification with the dictator or the regime. Passive acceptance rather than active support became the norm. There was not, as in Nazi Germany for example, an extensive significant involvement in the regime’s activities or in its political or cultural imaginary. ⁴⁶

The Spanish dictatorship, like the Portuguese, was based on a system that is not, on the surface, as attractive as the German or Italian ones. But their survival in the midst of democratic Europe shows their remarkable resilience; a factor that should deserve more attention from scholars, and which makes the term Parafascism a rich one rather than a weak, incomplete or even boring version of the more radiant Fascism. In addition, the term Parafascism offers a new venue to make a more comprehensive, transnational and decentralized history of Europe since the early 1930s. It is a term that may help us to hit with a single blow all the many heads of the hydras that populated, with so much grief, our continent.