FRANCO
J.P. Fusi, translated by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
New York: Harper and Row, 1987
202 pp., $25
Harper and Row has brought out this translation of J.P. Fusi's Franco just before another study of the same controversial figure, by Stanley Payne, is scheduled to appear. Though I have not yet seen Payne's biography, it may be assumed that from his earlier work on Spanish history his book, unlike Fusi's, will be factually detailed and generally dispassionate. Fusi, by contrast, does not present the fruits of arduous research; rather, he conveys his views in a biographical sketch of the leader who ruled Spain as its proclaimed caudillo (leader) between 1939 and 1975. Fusi takes repeated pains to appear unsympathetic toward Franco; Raymond Carr in the preface gives the same impression even more strongly, describing the later Francoist regime as an "authoritarian technocracy that sought to maintain the traditional Catholic values in a Spain of secular consumerism." Carr and Fusi both speak about, without proving, a "totalitarian" aspect in Franco's government. They also agree that its opening to the Left, starting in the 1980s, occurred because of "bad democratic conscience" and the quest for "democratic legitimacy."
Fusi generally ignores the rampant chaos in Spain that erupted in civil war on July 18, 1936. Although he lets us know that the Catholic opposition leader to the leftist government, Jose Calvo Sotelo, was assassinated on July 13 (with the complicity of cabinet members and republican military officers), he fails to mention that civil order had already broken down. Anarchists released from prison were looting houses, burning churches, and slaughtering clergy with minimal interference from civil authorities. Franco, according to Fusi has stayed out of politics up until that point and had even deplored the attempt by monarchist Gen. Jose Sanjurjo in 1932 to overthrow the recently established Spanish Republic.
Fusi states that Franco threw in his lot with the uprising of July 18, transporting an army of more than 47,000 men from North Africa to Spain, because of patriotic duty. Unfortunately, he never fully explains why Franco felt morally driven to rebellion in July 1936. Why did a commander who had denounced insurrectionaries, including Sanjurjo in 1932, join a generals' rebellion in 1936, particularly in view of his stated fear that "the failure of Sanjurjo's rising of 1932 would be repeated"? Fusi tries to answer this question by citing Franco's anxiety about communists, his relationships with other commanders, and his unwillingness to absorb "the constitutionalist and democratic conception of the army's role as subservient to legally constituted authority." In addition, he says,
"Franco never uttered a single generous or understanding word about the republic and was utterly insensible, if not actually hostile, to the democratic values which the republic represented, and incapable of appreciating the deep sense of history and of morality which inspired the ambitious programme of reform that republicans wanted to carry out in freedom and democracy."
These statements take no account of that hostility to Spanish religious institutions that Spain's experiment in freedom and democracy released. The anticlerical legislation of the "Red Republic" did not play well
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