The Falangist who was born three times

The best camouflage begins with words. Thus, while the German and Italian dictatorial regimes were initially characterized by their top leader (Hitlerism, Mussolinism), the more generic Nazism and Fascism gradually took over. In Spain, however, the opposite happened, and the figure of General Francisco Franco ended up covering everything up, including—and opportunely—the connivances of some, the changes of many, and the appeasement of many. This over-emphasis on the Leader It has also had historiographical consequences because many key figures of Franco's regime do not have good biographies or, worse still, they have not had time to whitewash their careers.

Rafael Sánchez Mazas (Madrid, 1894-1966) is precisely one of those names orphaned by a re-evaluation in accordance with its importance during the founding years of Falangism and the long National Catholic period. This has been precisely the intention of UdG professor Maximiliano Fuentes Codera (Buenos Aires, 1976). To this end, the Argentine historian based in Girona has drawn on his deep knowledge of the intellectual world of the time—starting with the referential figure ofEugenio de Oros—, in access to unpublished family documentation and a well-found rhetorical excuse: the three births of Sánchez Mazas. Because the Madrid-born essayist with Bilbao roots was reborn in 1939, when he escaped the Republican execution attempt at the sanctuary of Santa María del Collell, and in 2001 when he starred in the successful Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas.

Now, the great difficulty lies in capturing an elusive and omnipresent character, both victim and beneficiary of a series of twists of fate and, above all, hidden behind successive masks. "He was, like almost everyone, a mixture of contradictory things," we read: "somewhat ambitious and somewhat dilettante, somewhat a compulsive writer and somewhat lazy, somewhat distant from power and somewhat fully immersed in it."

The unusual survival of Sánchez Mazas

Precisely this ambivalence has made him fertile ground for later, self-serving stereotypes. This is the case with Andrés Trapiello, who seeks to reclaim his literary value as the foundation of a supposed dissidence, isolated from political commitment; superfluous layers for a Sánchez Mazas who, as Fuentes Codera shows, was above all profoundly useful—and complicit—as second-in-command to José Antonio Primo de Rivera first, articulating Falangist rhetoric and the link with conservative Catholicism, and later to Franco himself, in a further example of how the dictator manipulates power.

At its core, Sánchez Mazas's defense of violence was more theoretical than practical, and his embrace of fascism was more formal than real, useful for camouflaging a conservative and Catholic mindset, both anti-communist and anti-democratic, and above all anti-separatist. What made him significant was the Civil War and its unlikely survival. The former transformed the previously residual Falange into the sole hegemony of the party; the latter turned him into the essential element in all aspects of a New Regime with little intellectual depth. It is in this analysis—along with the vindication of the women in his life: his strict widowed mother, Rosario Mazas, and the young Italian woman, Liliana Ferlosio—that we find his main contributions and best pages, dismantling the biased self-portrait that placed him as a free-roaming figure within Franco's regime and sought a nearby shadow.