A Fascist of Sorts

...Notwithstanding his basically reactionary outlook, Franco thus had to rely upon the Falangists, and they, in turn, had to support him in preference to a monarchy likely to be, at best, boringly conservative and, at worst, dangerously liberal...

...At the start of the Spanish Civil War, the fascist powers decided to funnel their aid to the Nationalists solely through him-the chief reason for his emergence as leader...

...The Caudillo's price was simply too high: more grain and fuel than Germany could supply, as well as French Morocco, which would have put an end to the Fuhrer's hopes of obtaining the enthusiastic support of a collaborationist France, a more useful ally...

...Not surprisingly, the most extreme Falangists regarded Franco as an enemy, and he certainly opposed any aspect of the movement he did not control...

...What Preston shows further is that Franco not only wanted to enter the War on the Axis side but wrote to Hitler seriously offering to do so in June 1940, as France was collapsing...

...In 1931, however, he did nothing to prevent the creation of a republic, and during the next year he refused to take part in an early rebellion against it...

...Both, says Preston, "saw the blanket Nationalist repression of the [Spanish] Left as short-sighted, believing that it made more sense to recruit a working-class base" for a Falangism liberated from the devoutly Catholic and royalist encumbrances of the Old Right...

...But his borrowings from them included the one-party warfare state, his personal autocracy, the autarchic economic policies he promoted for years, and the darker side of his rhetoric: "Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed," he told a radio audience in 1939...

...In the narrowly political sense, Franco's regime was more repressive than those of Italy and even Germany...

...Perhaps such developments were what Franco had in mind when he denied, as he often did in the 1950s, that he was a dictator...

...Spain was not actually neutral throughout the fighting...

...His father-a liberal, Freemason, free-thinker, and bon vivant-deserted his pious Catholic mother when Franco was 14 years old, thereby generating his son's deepest prejudices, against such enemies of the Church as the Freemasons...

...German airplanes left Spanish airfields for raids against Allied ships...

...Instead Franco insisted, first, on fighting a civil war "sufficiently slow to permit thoroughgoing political purges" of the Left, and then on the "annihilation of large numbers of Republicans and the total humiliation and terrorization of the surviving population...

...Did Franco refrain from joining the Axis during World War II because, as he later claimed, he foresaw its outcome at the start...

...An outstanding biography, Franco (Basic, 1,002 pp., $37.50) by Paul Preston, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics, suggests answers...

...Franco aimed to rule out any return to liberal democracy...

...It distinguished between traditional autocracies that "tolerate social inequalities, brutality, and poverty" and revolutionary totalitarian autocracies that "create them...

...Hardly...

...In September 1936, monarchists in the Nationalist high command engineered his election-temporary, they thought-as chief of the Spanish state...

...Left-wing autocracies, by contrast, are far more inclined to persecute other Leftists...

...they eventually dismissed him as "a petty-minded battalion commander...

...they had considerable influence and a strong inclination to the Left...

...Francisco Franco was never the man of high principle he pretended to be...

...Still, democracy is much more firmly entrenched in Iberia than in Russia, and clearly will be for years if not decades...

...If Francoism was a form of fascism, it was certainly a peculiar one, but Preston shows that its peculiarities were not, in all cases, of the traditional variety implied by Kirkpatrick...

...General Francisco Franco, the Right-wing dictator of 39 years whose death in 1975 initiated the democratizing process, was no less hostile than Lenin to liberal institutions...

...to that extent Kirkpatrick was right...

...She later abandoned the poor fellow for a Paris furniture dealer...

...Why, then, did he have less success in thwarting them...

...Writers & Writing A FASCIST OF SORTS BY ROGER DRAPER IN 1979 JEANE KIRKPATRICK, later Ronald Reagan's first ambassador to the UN, won sudden notoriety by publishing in Commentary an article called "Dictatorships and Double Standards...

...in any case, he lacked the intellectual equipment to deal with matters of this sort...

...Over the next decade and a half, the success of economic integration with Europe made Franco increasingly irrelevant...

...Francisco Franco Bahamonde, the descendant of a long line of naval administrators, was born in 1892 at El Ferrol, in the north-western region of Galicia...

...Kirkpatrick regarded Franco's government as a traditional one...

...Though Franco was much less flexible in his choice of friends and enemies, he was just as egotistical...

...It is true that three of them-the Roman Catholic Church, the monarchists and the aristocracy-eventually facilitated the transition to democracy...

...Although Franco was no less repressive toward his enemies than the Communist societies of the period, he tolerated a great deal of diversity among his real and nominal allies...

...Preston, though, emphasizes that it had its totalitarian side as well...

...Nevertheless, he became politically dependent on the Falange...

...Franco's admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, the author reports, was not reciprocated...

...All this is well known...

...Nor did he ever indulge the Falangists' yearning for a purely fascist government...

...The Caudillo himself eludes Kirkpatrick's classifications...

...Years of rapid upward mobility-in 1926, at the age of 33, he became the youngest general in Europe-had convinced Franco that he was a latter-day El Cid destined to cast out the Freemasons, liberals, Socialists, and Communists, just as the Catholic Kings had cast out the perfidious Jews...

...Since he had no intention of giving up power during his lifetime, he was fated to bicker constantly with the royal family and its supporters...

...Their hopes, writes Preston, "were totally misplaced...

...The Caudillo appears to have felt that years of education under state tutelage had made Juan Carlos the sincere admirer of Francoism he pretended to be...

...Franco's exceedingly old-fashioned mentality also divided him from the fascist vanguard of the Spanish Right, with its rejection of clericalism, the Monarchy and conventional morality...

...In fact, she noted, that was happening in Spain...

...There were a lot of them in Spain, of course, and they were not merely eccentrics who took part in odd ceremonies...

...Some 18,000 Spanish "volunteers" fought on the Eastern Front with the Nazis...

...Over the years, he appointed many Cabinet ministers thoroughly hostile to the Falange...

...Most of the time he was quite cautious-so cautious that he waited until the last moment to join an uprising organized by other generals in the spring and early summer of 1936, following the electoral victory of an alliance of Left-wing parties...

...The reason was Franco's even more difficult relationship with the monarchists...

...In the 1950s, concerned for his political survival, he allowed his ministries to abandon his programs, though he himself believed in them...

...If there was a real comparison between him and those he saw as his historic prototypes, it was an ironic one...

...Spanish diplomats in Britain reported to Berlin on the impact of German bombing raids...

...Nothing could be done without his consent, to be sure, but he withdrew emotionally from a government whose policies he considered a distasteful necessity...

...In the wake of the events of 1985-91, Left-wing dictatorships can no longer be considered proof against liberal change...

...The El Cid of history, as opposed to romance, was an adventurer who fought at times for the Christians, at times for the Moors, and always for himself...

...Or possibly he saw Juan Carlos, like neoliberal economics, as an evil that had to be endured for the sake of survival...

...And in the Spain of today, he seems just as remote...

...But he did nothing to save the founder of the Falange, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, from execution by the Republic in November 1936...

...That, in plain fact, is why Spain stayed out of the War...

...FOR MORE THAN a decade after the Axis collapse, the Spanish economy continued to suffer from Franco's autarchic economic prejudices...

...for a time it was a nonbelligerent, a legal status closer to war...

...Spanish shipyards repaired and supplied German subs, whose crews were allowed to travel through the country...

...Yet in 1969, having temporized for years, he finally proclaimed as his eventual successor the traditionalist candidate, Juan Carlos de Borbon, eldest son of the heir of Alfonso XIII, rather than a more fascistically disposed Bourbon princeling who happened to be married to one of his own granddaughters...

...Two political offenders were garroted and five shot in the very last year of his life...

...He never controlled the royal family, the Church, the aristocracy, or even the Army, all of which plotted continually and almost openly against him- albeit never, for fear of unleashing a new civil war, in a serious way...

...The former, she argued, were preferable: "Although there is no instance of a revolutionary' Socialist' or Communist society being democratized, Right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve" in this way...

...Madrid's Axis sympathies-a telegram was dispatched to Japan congratulating it on Pearl Harbor-were undisguised to the end...

...But whatever his ambivalence toward the Spanish variety of fascism, he saw Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy as (in his own words) the great "bulwarks of culture, civilization, and Christianity in Europe...

...German experts examined Allied planes downed in Spain...

...But there were other, much more strenuously authoritarian elements behind Franco, including the openly fascist Falange...

...Among the many virtues of this book is the author's ability to navigate among the very different strands of the Spanish Right that converged behind Franco...

...He had shot up through the Army officer corps as a favorite of Alfonso XIII...