Franco's Long Reign
Gersh, Gabriel
Franco's Long Reign Franco: A Biographical History, by Brian Crozier. Little, Brown. 589 pp. $10. Franco: The Man and His Nation, by George Hills. Macmillan. 464 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Gabriel...
...Yet, as he himself brings to our attention, the General—despite his long abstention from politics—began to "acquaint" himself with Communism by subscribing to right-wing journals in the late 1920s...
...if anyone wants to congratulate Franco for his statesmanship, he should first thank the bloody resistance of the Spanish Loyalists...
...Franco's account of that period, Diary of a Battalion, enshrines his foremost values...
...He is puritanical, outwardly humorless, and he does not inspire the passion of a popular leader like Castro...
...Will these new groups upset the traditional balance of power...
...These are, above all, patriotism, the soldierly "virtues," and a strong belief in a "creed of ideals...
...Crozier makes much of the fact that Franco has been "non-political...
...Yet Franco's foreign policy after 1939 was dictated not by political principle or ideological fervor, but by weakness caused by famine, a ruined economy, a shortage of fuel, and a hostile population...
...Will they be content to accept the social structure that Franco has wrought once he disappears...
...Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh General Franco has been in power for as many years as was Stalin, longer than Mussolini, and nearly three times as long as Hitler...
...From this background emerged a man with a deep hatred of anarchy and a commitment to order...
...His reticence is proverbial...
...To the authors, Franco was a master of ambiguity and procrastination who reduced the threats and blandishments of the Nazi dictator to exasperation and rage...
...Nor is the record of suppression of dissident workers and students and Spain's cultural suffocation brought into focus...
...Having sifted the evidence and shed the veil of left-wing and right-wing mythology that surrounds Franco, the authors have arrived at some provocative conclusions about their subject...
...Both authors, I believe, would attribute Franco's success to modest economic progress and to his skill in balancing the forces from which the regime draws its strength...
...Had Franco succumbed to the Falange, the regime would have lacked that functionalism which has enabled Franco to meet changing conditions both within and outside the country...
...Part of the explanation lies in Franco's freedom from ideological or political ties and his lack of commitment to any principle other than that of national unity...
...Both books are less than satisfactory in their analysis of the impact of Franco's rule on Spain's internal development...
...Franco Spain is a balance between conflicting forces whose major point of agreement is fear of change: a traditional authoritarian regime of the kind pla-tonically imagined by soldiers of an earlier soldier generation...
...What also compounds their task is Franco himself, for he is not magnanimous...
...Crozier and Hills agree about Franco's qualities as a soldier with a noteworthy fighting record...
...He presents a Franco seething with fury not only about Guernica, but also about the Italian bombing of Barcelona and other cities...
...A notable example is his uncritical acceptance of Nationalist Senor Luis Bolin's claim that Guernica was destroyed in April, 1937, by the Communists...
...Perhaps the most interesting—and controversial—sections of these books deal with Franco's maneuvers to avoid direct involvement in World War II as Hitler's ally...
...Or have they become so accustomed to Franco's rule that they can hardly imagine an alternative to him...
...Surely no one can answer these questions, but the dictatorship that Franco has imposed on Spain is not a solution to the many problems of a nation only now beginning to emerge into the Twentieth Century...
...For instance, eighty pages or so of Crozier's study are devoted to Franco's twenty years of postwar rule, and regrettably this reflects an inevitably selective portrait that Franco and his supporters like to project...
...Will they, like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, ally themselves with the students to demand long overdue reforms...
...Surely he is a man of stature, and it is strange that though his supporters have written official lives, and several good studies of the Civil War have been written in English, no biography of Franco by an independent writer has appeared until now...
...Of the two books, Brian Crozier's overreacts to the Spanish Republican version of the Civil War...
...It was never possible for him to enter the war on the Nazi side, though he probably would have liked to have done so...
...The regime's two major financial crises, in the mid-Forties and in the late Fifties, are not examined in either book...
...Franco's incapacity to wage war arose not from lack of will on Franco's part, but from the consequences of the Civil War...
...Indeed, it is dangerous to undertake an historical biography of a leader during his lifetime—the more so when the subject still wields absolute power, as Franco does, in a period of social and economic ferment...
...One of the most striking features of the last decade has been the emergence of a technocratic elite, partly the result of Franco's belief that careers should be open to talent, of which his own life is the best example...
...How, then, can we explain the survival of this "non-political" general and the reasons for this survival despite the years of isolation imposed on him by the West and East alike...
...These two books, which present the first "objective" portraits of Franco, are by two journalists who draw on their vast resources of personal experiences and a wide knowledge of Spanish history...
...On the other hand, George Hills admits the Germans' responsibility for the bombing, but absolves Franco of all blame for it...
...It is a distortion, as Crozier rightly stresses, to regard Spain as a "Fascist" country...
...He rose to power in a Civil War and clung to it through World War II and the two decades of material progress and modernization that have wrought many changes in Spain...
...The authors chronicle his youthful campaigns as a commander in the Spanish Foreign Legion in Morocco in the 1920s...
Vol. 32 • June 1968 • No. 6
