Concept in Definition ABC

There are many people who approve the thought of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco with the ideology Nazi through the phalanx. But, the truth is that among the European dictators who ruled from the interwar period until their death, Franco is quite heterodox for a number of reasons, creating a doctrine that we could qualify as his own: the Francoism.

The Franco regime, in addition to the regime chaired by General Francisco Franco who ruled Spain from 1939 (at the end of the Civil War) until 1975, is also the ideology created around it.

Francoism is not only a set of ideas (that make up a doctrine) of the extreme right, but also nationalist and fiercely anti-communist among other “anti” tics.

The Franco regime considered Spain as an indivisible unit, united by the Castilian language and the culture of Castilla, of Catholic tradition, and with a civilizing mission in the world that it has already carried out and continues doing.

Thus, Francoism consists of a patriotic exaltation of a specific Spain, of an ideal that does not correspond to a much more complex and diverse socio-political reality.

Politically, the Franco regime is not based on the traditional Falange, a political party created by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933, but in a homonymous formation but whose ideology is an amalgamation of several other formations.

José Antonio (of whom, by the way, his little sympathy towards Franco is known) created a party in the image and likeness of the fascist Italian.

Through the Unification Decree of 1937, the Falange and the Carlist Traditionalist Communion were merged into a single formation politics, and the rest of the dissolved formations.

For this reason, whoever wanted to do politics in Franco's Spain had to do so through the single party, and therefore also the The ideology of this political formation was an amalgamation of the ideologies of both formations, with ideals sometimes contradictory.

With regard to the cultural and territorial ordering, the Franco regime submits everything to the same of Castile.

Thus, the language of Spain is Castilian. During the Franco regime, the other languages ​​spoken in the Spanish State were pursued, such as Catalan, Euskera (Basque) or Galician, which were prohibited, as well as certain cultural samples of these peoples.

The history of Spain was also manipulated to show that the unity of Spain was something predestined and even desired (it was to write that the Count of Barcelona was "Spanish without knowing yet that he was" ...).

The Catholic devotion of the Franco regime is unquestionable, and Spain is even given the "civilizing" mission of taking the Christian-Catholic religion to the rest of the world.

Franco himself and his wife (Carmen Polo) were devout Catholics; Franco kept the uncorrupted hand of Santa Teresa on his nightstand.

In this context, the Spanish conquest of America was seen (and continues to be) by the Franco regime as a civilizing mission and evangelizing, without questioning the massacres of natives or other practices, often hidden or reinterpreted by the defenders of the Francoism.

Like all dictatorial regimes, Franco considers those who differ from the ideological pillars that sustain it as enemies.

Internal repression, both against political enemies (democrats, moderate republicans, communists, ...) and cultural (Catalan, Basque, Galician, leftist intellectuals, ...) is total, although over the years, in the last sections of the dictatorship it will moderate very slightly (for example, some books could be published in languages ​​other than Spanish, although very few, on non-political-social topics, and censored).

With the death of the dictator and the arrival of the democracy After the transition, one might wonder if the Franco regime also ended, but the truth is that they are not few voices that speak of a survival of this, what has been called the "Franco sociological".

The sociological Francoism consists of the remains of Francoist thoughts, people or families closely linked to the Franco regime, and even power structures inherited from the old regime.

The transition process was a pact between the political and social forces that clamored for a return to legitimacy democratic, and a dying Franco regime that knew that it could not keep the country in dictatorship for much longer, but that struggled to avoid a revanchism that would attack it.

In other words, the transition was more of a way of moving from one state of affairs (the Franco dictatorship) to another state of affairs (the parliamentary democracy) without carrying out a “clean slate” or passing accounts with those who committed crimes in the past.

This, which initially seemed to be a good solution, left unclosed wounds in Spanish society, which have been reopening over time.

The great gap between the Popular Party (considered by many voices on the left as the intellectual heir to the Francoism, with a speech passed through the sieve of democracy) and Podemos (approved from the ranks of the right, Popular Party included, as a kind of republican revenge with a strong communist presence) is proof of the reopening of those wounds poorly closed.

Another is the claim by the families of people from the Republican side who were reprimanded and murdered during the war and at the end of this, to open the mass graves to identify their relatives, and to which they have refused since the government of the Popular Party to "not reopen old wounds."

The Catalan question, one of the axes that has periodically led to problems for the Spanish State, and which is now such a hot news, it is also a direct and indirect result of another file closed falsely during the transition.

Photo: Fotolia - Vladimir Wrangel

Topics in Francoism