Franco, the mediocre one (according to Josep Fontana)

Now that Vox has revived and brazenly exposed the Francoist soul of Spain, it's worth explaining exactly what the dictatorship was. Let's be blunt: it was a savage and a complete disaster. Mediocrity in power for forty years. Who better than an authoritative voice like that of historian Josep Fontana (1931-2018) to provide a summary? His perspective is as informed as it is relentless. FrancoismJoaquim Albareda and Jaume Claret have compiled for the Eumo publishing house a devastating selection of Fontana's writings on the period. It wasn't his primary subject of study, but it was an obsession, a self-imposed professional, historical, and civic-political duty.

To begin, some biographical notes. Starting with a family in which "all the siblings shared a hatred for their father," who abandoned his wife and children to settle in Madrid with another woman. As an adult, "he often expressed contempt for his all-powerful son." When he fell seriously ill in 1942, Franco didn't even visit him. And what about his marriage to Carmen Polo, the NecklacesFontana reviews the reasonable doubts about the pregnancy. No one ever saw her pregnant. And the dates don't add up. "These doubts are linked to the total lack of sexual references" in Franco's writings. Let's leave it at that. Hidden miseries. Let's get to the miserable military and political matter.

How did that obscure officer, whom his academy classmates called Francisquito—he was 1.64 meters tall—progress? Well, with the Legion in Morocco, where brutality and cruelty were the norm. General Batet, in his confidential report on the Annual disaster of 1921, spoke of a troop that was running "on morphine, cocaine, or alcohol," and elaborated on Franco:Commander Franco of the Tercio, so betrayed and removed for his valor, has little of a military man about him; he feels no satisfaction in being with his soldiers, for he spent four months in the plaza to cure a voluntary illness, which he could very well have done in the field, shamefully and brazenly exploiting an illness that did not prevent him from being all day in bars and circles. With the 1936 coup, Batet, loyal to the Republic, was captured in Burgos and sentenced to death. Franco refused to pardon him.

What ideology did the Caudillo have? "There is nothing fascist about him. It is not known that he ever read Mussolini or Hitler, nor did he ever include anything similar in his doctrinal references. Behind his vision of Spanish history are the same ideas common to Spanish integralism, stemming from the loss of the colonies in 1898 and an imperial expansion with three points: recovery of Gibraltar, annexation of Portugal, and, above all, compensation for the lost empire in America with a new African empire that must encompass Morocco and Oranse."

The true Francoist political program was to undo democratic "republican reformism," which was far removed from the revolutionary tendencies attributed to it. The method? The violence—in this respect, it does imitate fascist modernity—which, according to Fontana, was not "an accident of the power grab, but a stable political measure." And the support of an ultra-conservative Church that controlled education and morality, a bastion of a National Catholic regime. The 1952 Eucharistic Congress in Barcelona, ​​known as the Olympics of the Host, gave international legitimacy to Francoism.

Fontana also dismantles the myth of the supposedly skillful relationship with Hitler. "Franco was not neutral" during the Second World War and was "neither astute nor prudent." "He was stupid enough to be blindly convinced that the Germans should win the war." The Generalissimo did want to engage the Nazis in combat, and if, beyond the token Condor Legion, he didn't, "it was because Hitler didn't consider it worthwhile." He survived the Nazi defeat "in exchange for condemning the country to isolation and leaving it out of the aid given to the countries of Western Europe" (Marshall Plan). In other words, remaining in power at the expense of the general misery of the Spanish people.

And through repression and revenge: Fontana estimates that the Franco regime executed between 1936 and 1944 numbered between 150,000 and 300,000 people. An atrocity. Pinochet and Videla in Chile and Argentina pale in comparison. Of course, Queipo de Llano had proposed removing the words "forgiveness" and "amnesty" from the dictionary. A grim shadow that still resonates today, doesn't it? And then there were the inhumane prisons and forced labor, not only for the construction of the Valley of the Fallen: "Suitcases, furniture, toys, radios, etc., were manufactured in the prisons. Until very late in life, El Corte Inglés sold clothing made in women's prisons, run and managed by nuns." crusades".

Who else got rich? Catalonia, Barcelona. Regarding Mayor Porcioles, whom the Maragall faction tried to rehabilitate, Fontana points out that his notary office concentrated the real estate business in the capital, "to which he added his participation as a member of the boards of directors of Banco Condal, Fiicao, and the Inpcasa paper mill in Balaguer (possibly responsible for the Lleida forest fires)." "When he had to retire from municipal politics, the former mayor was one of the ten richest men in Spain." Neither his figure nor his program of the three Cs (Municipal Charter, Montjuïc Castle, and Compilation of Catalan Law: it should be added—of Madrid as a problem, "the Catalan problem"The perspective hasn't changed much in that respect either.

Another one who made a fortune was Demetrio Carceller, an Aragonese immigrant to Terrassa, a pioneer and initiator of large-scale corruption as Minister of Commerce and Industry (1940-45). It wasn't the isolation of the regime, but a deliberate and profoundly misguided action." From 1940 to 1951, inflation grew at a rate of 14% annually. The black market (the black market) ruled. Only oranges were exported, and the INI (National Institute of Industry) cultivated a disaster after equipping El 3 of 1950. or Finland. It wasn't until 1959, with the Opus Dei technocrats, that things began to recover with tourism, remittances from immigrants, and the influx of foreign capital.

All this was Francoism, according to Fontana. All this is what Vox whitewashes.