by Hugh Thomas
Some intellectual framework to these diverse efforts seemed in that time of ideologies desirable. Nicolás Franco favoured the creation of a ‘patriotic party’, such as Primo de Rivera’s Patriotic Union. A hundred ideas were canvassed: a Francoist Falange? ‘Restoration’?—words which went further than One Country, One State, One Leader. But how far could they go in the course of the war? On 27 February, the ‘Royal March’ became the national anthem of Franco’s Spain. But the ‘Oriamendi’, the ‘Cara al Sol’, and the anthem of the Legion also had to be listened to standing up, in honour of the dead. Even so, with the red and gold flag, the change seemed encouraging to monarchists. But what monarchy? Surely not that of 1931, much less that of 1923. The ‘new state’ of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose emblem, the yoke and the arrows, was everywhere to be seen? The Moorish bodyguard outside Franco’s headquarters, on the other hand, suggested a more despotic style of authority than Spain had seen in its kings for generations. One political attitude, negative though it might seem, was constant: to kill the nineteenth century, ‘liberal, decadent, masonic, materialist and Frenchified’, and ‘to return to impregnate ourselves with the spirit of the sixteenth century, imperial, heroic, proud, Castilian, spiritual, mythical and chivalrous’.1 One sign of this new heroic attitude was the change in street names: nineteenth-century politicians, such as Castelar or Salmerón, disappeared as well as, naturally, ‘14 April’ from the cities, which were taken over by ‘Berlin’, ‘Labour’, or ‘San José’. In the no-man’s-land where propaganda, ideology, and battle cries became one, it was sometimes hard to know if these thoughts represented revolution or counter-revolution. There was a press campaign, for example, in favour of ‘concision, rapidity, and an end to the spirit of procrastination’. The rehispanization of customs, names of hotels, and even of dishes became a fever in the minds of propagandists, who tried to insist that everything sounding foreign should vanish from the vocabulary: Russian salad became ‘national’ salad, ragoût left the menus, even the tortilla a la francesa lost its gallic name. (What should it become? Simply tortilla.)2 That was the way to talk with ‘an imperial accent’. Major Bruno burned 5,000 books in Córdoba. There was a comparable drive to banish other ‘liberal’ ways of behaving: the full bathing-suit was de rigueur at two years old and for all men, there was ‘war on the decolleté dress’, and the short skirt. The sleeve had to go to the wrist, while all egalitarian manners and styles of address were severely frowned upon. Anyone who said salud in republican style risked a visit from the police.
There were many other manifestations of the fascist counter-renaissance of which there were so many comparable examples in Italy and Germany.3 Nationalist Spain was thus in the early stages of a cultural revolution. Three elements—conservatism, reactionary nostalgia and fascism—were alike present in the nationalist movement, but there was also Millán Astray’s evangelical medievalism and his appeals for a return to chivalrous christianity. ‘To me, mutilados!’ he would bellow to the war-wounded, in his capacity as president of their association, just as once he had called ‘A mí la Legión’ to the Foreign Legion; and the men in wheelchairs and crutches would do their poor best to come to attention. The propaganda worked. Fighting for ‘old Spain’, against Russia, ‘Marxismo’, and masonry, many upper- and middle-class Spaniards found in ‘the movement’ something which almost did take them back to the days of the Crusades. The young Duque de Fernán Núñez, for example, who was killed on the Madrid front in November, wrote a classical last letter to his wife which expresses in mood the unreflective nobility of a paladin: ‘Thus I am going, tranquil and constant, regretting only making you suffer … I hope [the children] may live in a world calmer and more normal than this, one where Manolo will continue the traditions of the house, practising virtue, duty and work, and knowing how to choose our friends.’1 It may be, however, that young Manolo and his friends would have been already ranged in the ranks of nationalist Spain’s equivalent of Mussolini’s balilla or youth movement: under the name of pelayos, cadetes or flechas, the small boys of Salamanca, Seville and Burgos paraded these days in uniforms of the Falange, or the Carlists, with wooden rifles.
The church remained a fervent ally of the régime. Characteristic of the régime’s propagandists was the depiction on nearly all its postage stamps of views of cathedrals, taking the place of the faces of republican or socialist leaders. Divorces and civil marriages concluded under the republic were annulled. Sermons were often close to political harangues. Priests would often end their sermons with a ‘¡Viva España!’ or a viva for the Generalissimo. One Sunday, in the monastery of La Merced at Burgos, during high mass, the priest broke off spontaneously in the middle of administering the sacrament.
O, you that hear me [he said]! You who call yourselves Christians! You are to blame for much that has happened. For you have tolerated in your midst, yea, and even employed in your service workmen banded together in organizations hostile to our God and our country. You have heeded not our warnings and have consorted with Jews and freemasons, atheists and renegades, so helping to strengthen the power of the very lodges whose aim it was to hurl us all into chaos. Be warned of the tragedies of today! You should be to all these people—as we must all be—as fire to water … no dealings with them of any kind … no pardon for criminal destroyers of churches and murderers of holy priests and ministers. Let their seed be stamped out—the evil seed—the seed of the Devil. For verily the sons of Beelzebub are also the enemies of God!1
Catholics knew that hundreds of priests had been murdered in republican Spain, and believed that the numbers of the dead churchmen were greater even than they really were. There were few families too by now who had not had some relation, or close friend, shot on the other side of the battle-line. Further, the nationalist zone was increasingly reached by people after amazing journeys of great danger, and the stories of such people filled the papers. The Civil Governor of Córdoba, Marín Alcazar, would end his wild speeches on the radio with medieval cries such as ‘¡Santiago ¡Cierra España!’ (‘Santiago’ and ‘Close ranks Spain’.2
There was a difference between the commitment of the Spanish hierarchy to the nationalist cause, and the attitude of the Vatican. True, when, in September, Pope Pius XI had received six hundred Spanish refugees from the republic, he had spoken of the ‘satanic’ behaviour of the godless in Spain.3 But now, at the end of December, Franco complained to the Italian ambassador, Cantalupo, of the Pope’s attitude to the nationalist cause. His representative at the Vatican had suggested to the Pope that he should publicly condemn the Basques. But Pius refused, perhaps due to the influence of Monsignor Múgica, the bishop of Vitoria. The furthest that the Pope would go would be to issue a condemnation of Catholic cooperation with communists. He also complained of the execution of Basque priests by nationalist troops, and showed himself gloomy about Franco’s prospects.4 Presumably this attitude on the part of the Pope was caused by the relations of Franco with Mussolini and Hitler. But these Roman hesitations were only rarely felt by priests and Catholics in Spain. For them, the ‘crusade’ was a holy war; the bishop of Salamanca had described communists and anarchists as sons of Cain, and the primate had designated the war as a punishment for the laicism and corruption imposed on the Spanish people by the political leaders: ‘the Jews and masons had poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines, and tartar and mongol tales had been converted into a political system’.1 There was a steady increase in attendance at church: in one village in Aragon, for example, in 1937 only 58 out of a population of 1,200 of an age to go to communion did not confess at Easter; in 1936, the figure had been 302.2
But there were dissensions within the church. The difficulties caused by the bishops of Pamplona and Vitoria have been described. The bishop of Vitoria, Monsignor Múgica, had been now several months in Rome and, when news came that certain Basque priests who had sympathized with, or acted as chaplains to, the Basque nationalist forces had been shot, he wrote a full, reasoned and convincing re
port to the Pope.3 He saw Pius XI on 24 November, and the subsequent papal representation to Franco was one reason why the shootings of Basque priests—there had already been fourteen of them—came to an end.4
All these priests had been shot precipitously without trial, and buried without coffins, funeral services, or official registration. One of those shot was a Carmelite monk, the rest parish priests; one of them, Father José Aristimuño, was an active Basque nationalist writer (though he had apparently opposed the alliance of Basque nationalism with the Left), and another a priest deservedly famous locally for his piety, Father Joaquín Arín, arch-priest of the little steel town of Mondragón.5 Later, Cardinal Gomá tried to explain the deaths of these priests by saying that they had brought their troubles on themselves: a view which, expressed in an open letter to President Aguirre, brought another denunciation by Monsignor Múgica before the Pope. (He had already told Gomá to his face that Franco and his soldiers would have done better to have kissed the feet of the venerable Father Arín than to shoot him.)1 A third letter, to Cardinal Pacelli, in March, would follow when the archbishop of Burgos, Manuel Castro, sought to excommunicate those priests of the Basque provinces who continued loyal to the Basque nationalist movement. Monsignor Múgica, each day more partisan, prevented that condemnation, and continued to support the Basque cause from Rome.
Similarly, the archbishop of Tarragona, Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, saved from assassination by Companys, withdrew into a Swiss exile with a silence that everyone knew signified condemnation of atrocities on both sides in the war.2 Finally, the crusaders had their disputes with those foreign Catholics of distinction who, like Bernanos, Mauriac and Maritain (‘the Jew Maritain’, nationalist propaganda inaccurately tried to call him) and those who, like the bishop of Dax in southern France, tried to mediate, or to arrange the exchange of prisoners. (The latter bishop went to Bilbao in September to try to comfort right-wing prisoners, who were confined in a horrible prison ship, more or less as hostages; subsequently, he sought to arrange an exchange. But the authorities in Salamanca could not accept that any authority of the church could have contact with the ‘reds’.)
The nationalist leaders feared disturbances at the rear, and still caused to be shot enemies of the régime as part of the limpieza, the ‘cleaning’ of Spain of its foreign imported diseases, including, haphazardly, prisoners. Of course, there were some guerrilla actions in, for example, Galicia or the Gredos mountains inspired by revolutionaries or government sympathizers who had hidden after the nationalist conquest of the area concerned. Cantalupo, the first Italian ambassador to nationalist Spain, began his mission by asking for an end of the slaughter of prisoners. Franco told him that the shooting of prisoners had stopped.3 That was not so. The failure of humane democracy in Spain had given power to one of the coldest-hearted men, a man intolerant of human foibles, humourless but able, calm and determined. One day that winter, Bernhardt was lunching with Franco (whom he admired). The question came up as to what to do with four militiawomen, captured, armed with rifles. Franco believed that all women captured in arms should be shot. ‘There is nothing else to be done’, he said, ‘shoot them’, without changing the tone that he would use for discussion of the weather.1 To Colonel Faldella, chief of staff of the Italian troops who began to arrive in large numbers in the course of the winter, Franco made clear that his policy was not to defeat armies, but to conquer territory, ‘accompanied by the necessary purges’.2
Two stages may be traced in the character of nationalist executions. At the beginning, shooting occurred without any judicial proceedings whatever. After a while, these terrible autos-da-fé of informal repression gave way to courts-martial, without, however, much greater guarantees for the victims, for the presiding judges were often young lieutenants who, after a while, thought no more of condemning men to death than ‘shooting rabbits’.3 The ‘crimes’ committed by some who were shot had been, it is true, sometimes odious; while some, such as republican officers, particularly of the civil guard, must have known that death was likely for them if they had opposed the rebellion. Spies and people who had taken part in church burnings, or killing in the republican zone, were likely to be executed in any such war. But the list of persons offered the last rites in, for example, the gaol of Torrero, in Saragossa, is astonishing; not only were most people shot who had actively taken part in the republican war effort (for example, Colonels Encisco, one of the founders of the group of republican officers UMRA, and González Tablas, both captured at the front), but also Jaime Pérez, the grave digger of a small village (Blesa, Teruel), whose ‘crime’ was merely to have buried prominent people of the Right. Another man was shot because, when the legal records of the village of Blesa were being burned, in the middle of the street, he stirred the fire with a stick. Many complicated hatreds and conflicts of evidence came to light and were disposed of arbitrarily. Accusations might be made that so-and-so (a maid in a hotel, a bus conductor, or a soldier) had betrayed such-and-such a person of the Right. Once, a political commissar captured on the Teruel front was accused by a brother republican officer, also captured, of having killed a militiaman who had wanted to desert. The commissar said that he had reported the lieutenant for theft, but nevertheless he was shot, telling the priest who gave him extreme unction that he blamed nobody for his death; society alone was evil.1 In Córdoba victims of Colonel Cascajo or Major “Bruno” might be sent to the ‘agrarian reform’: that meant they would go to the six feet of ground where they would be buried. The numbers of those who, in one way or another, were condemned and shot continue to be difficult to estimate, but they could not have been much less than 1,000 a month, and sometimes, as when a city was captured, many more.
Innumerable republicans, revolutionaries and prisoners-of-war, Basque priests, separatists of every kind, found themselves in the crowded gaols of the nationalist rearguard, at the mercy of prison governors and warders who were often pedantic, frivolous, and cruel. Prisoners might be shot on the spot for giving a viva to the republic, they might be punished by having letters from their wives torn up, or be forbidden to receive letters from, or write to, fiancées. ‘When hearts understand each other, bars do not exist’, wrote one wife to a husband; the prison official asked the husband if he believed that any decent woman could write in such a manner.2 In Córdoba, Colonel Cascajo forbade mourning.
For those who escaped death or imprisonment, there was the risk, if the person concerned had been in any way a friend of the Left, of loss of employment. Civil servants had a hard time even if they had merely served the government between February and July 1936, unless they had taken a positive part at the time of the rising. Magistrates, schoolmasters, town clerks, even employees of the post office who continued in those tasks after July in the republican zone and were subsequently ‘liberated’ had a difficult time securing their livelihood.1
A few voices were raised on behalf of toleration: one of them was Hedilla, the falangists’ leader, in his Christmas speech of 1936: speaking to falangists who were concerned with investigations, he said, ‘Prevent with all energy anyone from satisfying personal vengeances, ensure that nobody punishes or humiliates the man who, out of hunger or desperation, has voted for the Left. All of us know that, in many places, there were—and are—people of the Right who are worse than the reds …’ He ended this speech by opening his arms ‘to the worker and to the peasant: let none of the social benefits achieved by the workers stay on the drawing board without producing an effect and without being converted into reality’.2 But Hedilla was not in a position to put these fine thoughts into action. Furthermore, if he, and some others, such as Dionisio Ridruejo, the new head of the Falange in Valladolid, might think like that, many of their comrades in the Falange thought more of their requisitioned cars, their escorts (armed to the teeth), and their own political futures.
Economically, nationalist Spain was in good shape. Their peseta was quoted internationally at double the rate of that of the republic. They possessed nearl
y all the food that they needed, and were backed by most of the old Spanish financiers and bankers. Their credit continued good for essential supplies, including oil. During the winter of 1936–7, a new currency was printed by the firm of Gieselke in Leipzig, on the initiative of Johannes Bernhardt, that gradually superseded the old notes. It was backed simply by the will to victory on the nationalist side, and not at all by gold.3 Control of prices was rendered formal on 13 October, and provincial committees to ensure this were established under the civil governors, with representatives of the Falange and the army. The branches of the National Bank of Spain at Burgos and at Seville acted as the central banks of the country. The funds available there to the rebel authorities (500 million pesetas) were supplemented by luxury taxes of 10 per cent on tobacco and wine, and also by a levy on all incomes over 60,000 pesetas. Accounts of Popular Front parties were confiscated and the assets of some foreign companies taken over, if only temporarily. All debts owed to anyone in the republican zone were declared void. Externally, the nationalist peseta was fixed at 42.50 pesetas to the pound. These measures were much more effective than comparable measures in the republic but, even so, a modest inflation continued.1
It has been already suggested that, in August 1936, the area of Spain controlled by the rebels produced only about one-third of Spanish taxes. By December, the capture of San Sebastián and of the Tagus valley had increased the area ‘liberated’, but it still produced less than two-fifths of the national taxes before the war. At the same time, spending by the new authorities was running at a rate greater than a normal Spanish government in the whole country in time of peace. How was this money raised? First, the reliance on Germany and Italy for arms meant that the largest single item of expenditure was secured, like oil, on credit (that also had the effect of giving Germany and Italy, as well as Texas, a strong interest in Franco’s victory). Second, subscription schemes played a great part, even if they sometimes degenerated into opportunities for intimidation. There were constant appeals for gifts of jewellery, gold or cash: indeed, in November 1936, the authorities insisted on the exchange of all gold in private hands for cash.2 It does not seem, however, that this raised much. But similarly, all foreign money in private hands or the hands of companies had theoretically to be handed over. This stipulation affected foreign companies as well, except for German or Italian ones. Nearly all the money that was so collected in the early months of the civil war went into the hands of Bernhardt’s HISMA. No money was allowed to be taken abroad by private citizens, interest on the national debt was suspended, while another scheme to raise money was the so-called Plato Unico, an innovation of Queipo de Llano’s, copied from Germany, whereby clients at restaurants received one course, but paid for three, the balance being paid to the authorities. (It became in the end, however, merely a tax on meals.) Ineffective though this may have been, it was more successful than the days Sin Postre and Sin Cigarro (without pudding, and without tobacco).
