Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Not everyone, however, embraced the first wave of name-changes and statue removals. A young politician called José María Aznar complained in the La Nueva Rioja newspaper in 1979 that town councils were removing the honours and street names of ‘the former Head of State who, although it obviously bothers some people, governed for forty years and was called Francisco Franco’.

  ‘Instead of devoting themselves to improving their municipalities, they spend their time rubbing away history,’ wrote Aznar. Seventeen years later, as Spanish prime minister, he would avoid, as far as possible, even mentioning Franco’s name.

  Some right-wing mayors agreed with Aznar and refused point blank to rename their squares and avenues. They can still be found, normally in small towns and villages of what was once ‘zona nacional’ – the western half of Spain that fell almost immediately to the right’s rebellion.

  I only had to travel a few miles south from the mass grave near Poyales del Hoyo to find an example. In the small town of Navalcán, as in many pueblos, the contrast between old and new was immediate. Here old women dressed in black still sat out in small groups on the pavements on low, wood and wicker chairs. Broad straw hats kept the sun off them as they sewed or embroidered. The Socialist mayor of this town of 2,300 people was just twenty-five years old. He was not just the youngest mayor in living history, he was also the first left-wing mayor since before 1936. This was a child of Spain’s democratic transition. He had no memory or first-hand knowledge of Franco or Francoism.

  During the Franco years Navalcán had been governed by a series of mayors who were the natural heirs of the old caciques, the local political strongmen who had traditionally controlled the Spanish countryside. It remained right-wing after his death.

  The arrival of a Socialist mayor had been a major event. It was also an eye-opener for the young mayor. ‘Some elderly people insisted on congratulating me in private. They did not want others to see them doing it. They still thought there might be something to be afraid of,’ he said.

  An elderly man with a Valencian accent came and sat with us. He was the town’s former bank manager, a former clerk to the local priest and self-appointed local historian. He pointed to a white-painted three-storey building on the far side of the square. ‘That is where one of the mayors would rape the girls,’ he whispered. ‘His illegitimate children are still here. In this town, all we have to do is look into people’s faces to know where they come from.’ His story may well have been a local myth. It summed up, however, the combined feelings of fear and acquiescence in places where Francoism conferred extraordinary power on its local representatives.

  In Navalcán it was still possible, stepping out of the town hall, to go for a circular walk without leaving for more than a few moments the streets with Francoist names. The walk took you through the Plaza General Franco and streets dedicated to General Yagüe, the Defenders of the Alcázar (a fortress in nearby Toledo) and General Queipo de Llano.

  Born after Franco died, the young mayor’s generation had learnt the basic facts of his life and times at school, but little more. Now, however, he was being forced to catch up on some local history. Several graves of those shot by Quinientos Uno had been located nearby and there was talk of digging them up. There were also proposals for changing some, or all, of the streets back to the original names they had borne for centuries. Those proposals had, in turn, caused a stink in the town. It was unclear what would happen. But there was no doubt that, here at least, Franco’s ghost was still about.

  Santos Juliá, a prominent historian, sums up Spain’s attitude to its former dictator like this: ‘Spaniards have an ambiguous valuation of Franco. They do not satanizan, (literally diabolicalise), him like the Germans do with Hitler. Perhaps that is due to the fact that most living adults do not remember the worst years of the thirties and forties, rather they remember the fifties, sixties and seventies … And they recall that in the second half of Francoism there was a lack of freedom but also an improvement in the material quality of life.’

  When he first attained power Franco embarked on a disastrous drive for autarky, of proud national self-reliance. He blamed the failure of that not on rampant corruption and his own regime but on an international plot of freemasons, communists and so-called false democracies – meaning Britain, France and the US. Eventually, he handed the economy over to technocrats, many of them from the austere Opus Dei Catholic movement. The result was an opening up to the world and a chance to start playing catch-up with the rest of Europe. The economy eventually boomed, giving rise to what became known as the ‘años de desarrollo’, ‘years of development’. From 1961 to 1973 Spain’s economy grew by 7 per cent a year. In the developed world, only Japan was growing quicker. Incomes quadrupled. This, in turn, helped produce what came to be referred to as ‘franquismo sociológico’. In other words, Franco became – admittedly to a degree that was never formally measured – popular in some parts of Spanish society. This was because, in a country which had suffered from famine, hunger, war and need for the best part of two decades, life suddenly, and rapidly, got better. ‘After all, Franco did not rule by repression alone: he enjoyed a considerable popular support,’ comments Preston. This, he adds, was largely due to ‘the passive support of those who had been conditioned into political apathy by political repression, the controlled media and an appallingly inadequate state education system’.

  Just how popular Franco was, is, of course, impossible to say. Manuel Jiménez de Parga, head of the country’s Constitutional Court, caused a stink by claiming the ‘immense majority’ of Spaniards were franquistas. It was one of the least politically correct – and most debatable – commentaries on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the constitution in 2003. True or not, most Spaniards do not want to believe that about themselves, or about their parents and grandparents. It would imply that, somehow, they had supported or collaborated with the dictator. Judge Jiménez de Parga’s view, however exaggerated, would certainly explain why up to half a million Spaniards queued up to pay their last respects to him as his coffin lay in state in 1975.

  It also, however, raised a difficult question. If the country’s senior judge was right, or even partially so, where were all those franquistas now?

  If finding physical proof of Franco’s existence proved nearly impossible, finding those willing to defend his name – or admit that they themselves had supported him – proved even harder. I had gone to Márquez Horrillo because I thought his branch of the Falange, the long-winded Falange Española de las JONS, might provide some examples. But it turned out that not only did Márquez barely have any support, he did not really consider himself a Francoist either.

  In private, Márquez Horrillo turned out to be a lonely, gentle, polite old man still suffering after the recent death of his wife. I was the first foreign journalist to interview him, the ‘national leader’and direct heir to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, in over twenty years. That alone was proof of how marginal the once powerful Falange had become. Franco, he said, had betrayed the Falange, using it as an instrument for keeping power and debasing its principles. Primo de Rivera, he insisted, had been a visionary and a revolutionary.

  At a campaign meeting for his party at Madrid local elections only one hundred people turned up. A similar number of police stood guard outside the school where the meeting was held. We watched a film of Primo de Rivera giving the 1933 speech, at Madrid’s Teatro de la Comedia, when he founded the Falange and warned that it would use ‘knuckles and pistols’. The occasion ended, once more, with stiff arms and a rendition of the ‘Cara al Sol’. It was distinctly uncomfortable to be the only person in the audience not standing and singing.

  Real Falangism, with its talk of nationalising banks and empowering workers, had gone to the grave with Primo de Rivera in 1936, just three years after he thought it up. Falangism, with its ideas of an ‘organic democracy’ representing families, trades and professsions, villages and towns, had been the last great political theory of the twentieth
century, Horrillo said. It is one which, curiously, inspired a political movement in the Lebanon which would also be known as Falangism. Talk of knuckles and pistols, Horrillo claimed, was simply standard for the time and place. It was not relevant to today.

  Other Falangist groups I tracked down proved more adoring of Franco, though hardly more popular. Some were barely concealed fronts for right-wing thuggery. These recruited amongst the skinheads of Real Madrid’s violent, racist Ultra Sur supporters and other gangs of football hooligans. Others were serious-minded radicals. I went to see a small, rag-tag crowd of them gather on a chilly street corner outside the National Court in the Calle Genóva on 19 November. Here they listened to José Cantalapiedra, a young Falangist leader with a black leather jacket and film-star looks. Cantalapiedra delivered a speech through a crackling microphone. He denounced Spain’s democratic governments, Basque and Catalan separatism, immigration, abortion, globalisation, banks and liberal capitalism. When he had finished, the crowd of a few hundred set off on an all-night walk to the Valley of the Fallen, carefully marshalled by several vanloads of police. It was one of the biggest dates in the Falange calendar. Yet, in a city whose streets are daily blocked by marchers of one kind or another, they occupied just a hundred metres of bus lane.

  Francoism, as a political concept, is long dead. Some argue that it never really existed as a properly defined ideology. Franco simply amalgamated all the right-wing and conservative elements of Spanish society – be they the army, the Church, the monarchists, Carlists, the landowners or the Falange – and did his best to stop them squabbling amongst themselves. Historians have pointed out that the cause of Francoism is best described ‘in negatives – what they were against’. Marxists, freemasons, free-thinkers and separatists formed an eclectic group of enemies. Franco’s early admiration for totalitarianism gave way, with the opposition either wiped out or left too cowed to act, to a form of authoritarian pragmatism. The brutal early repression has been described as ‘a kind of political investment, a bankable terror, which accelerated the process of Spain’s depoliticisation’.

  Franco’s main achievement was to stay in power, something he managed by force and instinct. His political philosophy, ‘National Catholicism’, was, as the name implies, mainly about patriotism and God. His main rule was that of obedience, to Church and State. It was hardly a recipe for major change in Spain. Along the way, however, the Generalísimo inoculated several generations of Spaniards against the extreme right. Their parties have never gained more than 2 per cent of the vote in the three decades since his death.

  There seemed to be something deeply ironic about the silence into which Francoism had been buried. For the Caudillo was, himself, an expert at silence. ‘One is the master of what one does not say, and the slave of what one does,’ he once warned his self-designated successor-to-be, the then prince Juan Carlos. This was the opposite of another, much older, Spanish theory on silence. Alonso de Ercilla, in a heroic sixteenth-century depiction of the Chilean natives’ resistance to the Spanish conquistadores, La Araucana, noted the tactical usefulness of silence but added: ‘There is nothing more difficult, if you look closely, than discovering a necio, a fool, if he keeps his quiet.’

  This particular facet of the Caudillo’s character is attributed to his origins in the wet, green, north-western Atlantic province of Galicia. Gallegos are meant to be famous for something called retranca, a sort of deliberate ambivalence or avoidance of committing themselves. Franco was retranca personified. He rarely let on what he was thinking, even to his ministers. His mysteriousness kept those around him on their toes. It allowed his propagandists to construct a mythical persona of wisdom, bravery, self-sacrifice and godliness. It also allowed Franco to reinvent himself continually, from Hitler ally to cunning evader of the Second World War or from Crusader to benign and loving patriarch. It also allowed his followers to blame the regime’s failings on those around him. Ultimately, critics claim, it allowed him to hide his own mediocrity. He was, one of his former ministers admitted, ‘a sphinx without a secret’.

  His regime was also a great enforcer of silence. To the silence forced on the vencidos, the defeated, was added the silence enforced by the censors, both political and religious. One of the first to fall victim was the seventy-two-year-old philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. He, at the height of the Civil War, told an audience of senior Francoists that ‘You will win but you will not convince.’ The retort from General José Millán Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion in which Franco had won his military honours as a fearless and ruthless young officer, was ‘¡Abajo la inteligencia!’ (‘Down with intellectuals!’ or ‘Down with intelligence!’). Unamuno, one of the few great minds left in Nationalist Spain, was removed from his position as Rector of Salamanca university and died soon afterwards. The British writer Gerald Brenan, travelling in 1949, found much of the country suffering famine, while the regime’s apparatchiks got rich off the black market. The press, meanwhile, carried virtually no news about Spain. A newspaper reader ‘might well suppose that nothing happens in the Peninsula except football matches, religious ceremonies and bullfights’. Censorship would slacken over the years, but it remained in place – in one form or another – until Franco’s death.

  The one-sided view of a regime which ruled by right of conquest was reflected, most of all, in schools. Spaniards have recently found a rich, deep vein of humour in the absurd things taught to them by the Franco regime.

  In Otones, a small farming village on the parched plain outside Segovia, locals have turned the former schoolhouse into a tiny museum to the education they received under el Caudillo. Alicia, a friend from the village, showed me around after one of those traditional Sunday feasts beloved of Madrileños of roast kid and local wine – pointing out the antiquated text books and the propaganda on the wall. The museum is there to laugh at. So, too, are the recently reprinted Francoist school textbooks (which have provided a small publishing boom and spawned films, like El Florido Pensil, based on them). These remind Spaniards of how they once learned that Franco was ‘a new El Cid, the saviour of Spain’. They contain such edifying teachings as: ‘Stimulants like coffee, tobacco, alcohol, newspapers, politics, cinema and luxury undermine us and waste our bodies away’; or ‘women have never discovered anything. They lack the creative talent, which God has reserved for men’; and ‘a wife has no rights over her own body. On marriage she gives up those rights to her husband. He is the only one who can use those rights and only for reproduction.’

  When General Franco died in 1975 the half a million people who queued up to pay their respects were not there, as the joke went, to check that he really was dead. Nor was it simply one of those occasions when Spaniards, often obstinate individualists when faced with authority, indulged their passion for doing things en masse. Bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, were broken open in some homes where the dictator’s death seemed long overdue. ‘Above the skyline of the Collserola mountains, champagne corks soared into the Autumn twilight. But nobody heard a sound,’ writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said of his home city, Barcelona. There was also a genuine outpouring of grief. Most of those who mourned, however, reneged on the Generalísimo long ago. The rest have, quite simply, sunk into silence.

  I found a few clues as to where they were, however, in my own Madrid neighbourhood. The most startling example came when I was shown an apartment in a street not far from the Retiro park by a smart Argentine woman who said she ‘liked to help friends sell their houses’.

  ‘You might not like the decoration,’ she warned. ‘These are elderly people with elderly peoples’ tastes.’

  At first sight there was nothing special about the décor, which showed the same taste for heavy wooden furniture, old leather, wooden crosses and fake papyrus lamp shades I had encountered in many other homes. Walking into the sitting room, however, I found myself gasping, involuntarily, with shock. The room was dominated by a life-size oil portrait of a man in a Second World War German military un
iform. Adolf Hitler stared out at me, a slight smile under his trademark moustache, wearing a field greatcoat and with something like a map case clutched in his hands.

  The effect, for this anglosajón, was like being punched on the nose. One of the greatest practitioners of genocide of the past century was a daily companion for the owners of this house. Even more bizarrely, however, the woman showing us around simply considered this a case of ‘old-fashioned’ décor.

  Unable to speak, I looked around me, taking in a glass cabinet containing an Iron Cross and a red (Falange or Carlist) beret and, to confuse me further, a photograph of the current king, Juan Carlos. My journalistic instinct should have led to a thorough quizzing of the ‘estate agent’ about who her friends were. Instead, I pushed my two small children out of the door and fled onto the street without even bothering to check the names on the mail-boxes in the reception hall downstairs. I was perplexed. It was not just the presence of a symbol which would turn the owner of any house in London, Paris or Berlin into a social pariah, but also the strange mixture of symbols. It was also the casual acceptance that this was just ‘old-fashioned décor’. Hitler, Juan Carlos, Iron Crosses and red berets just did not seem to make sense to me. It would take me a while to work out how they might fit together.

  A few months later I went to the Gran Peña club on Madrid’s Gran Vía, the city’s answer to Oxford Street or Shaftesbury Avenue. Roughly equivalent to a traditional London club, its members, many of them former military officers, had erected a bust of Franco in 1992. That was seventeen years after his death and the same year that ‘modern’ Spain was busy promoting itself at an Expo fair in Seville, at the Barcelona Olympic Games and during Madrid’s turn as the European Union’s ‘cultural capital’ for a year. The occasion was a public appearance by Blas Piñar, the virulently right-wing leader (and editor) of Fuerza Nueva, a neo-Francoist party that disbanded in 1982. The recalcitrant Blas Piñar was famous in the final days of Francoism for his denunciations of left-leaning priests. He was also one of the inspirations, if not fathers, of a gang of right-wing thugs called ‘The Guerrilleros of Cristo Rey’, who had attacked left-wingers in the 1970s (and 1980s). A handful of tall, shaven-headed young Germans stood respectfully in the crowded room as Blas Piñar, a gifted orator, railed against Spain’s young democracy. His speech was peppered with references to the saints and quotations from the bible, a large number of which he obviously held in his head.