Franco's million-dollar question

If, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Franco were to rise from the dead and be granted the wish to ask a single question about what has happened in the last half-century, his first impulse would be to ask whether Spain still remains unified. But since he could only ask one question, he would kill two birds with one stone (his hand was broken) and ask whether the monarchy still exists. After all, it was his great personal gamble for the future because, in his traditionalist view, a republic meant disorder and a monarchy meant unity.

He knew that with the dictator's death, the regime would also be dead, and that a monarchy was the only bullet he had left in the chamber to guarantee a life without trials or prisons for the Francoists, to facilitate political reform (not rupture) and to place national indissolubility on the constitutional frontispiece of whatever regime was to come.

Juan Carlos de Borbón himself has revisited the famous scene in his published memoirs. At the end of his life, Franco asked only one thing of him: to maintain the unity of Spain. In the Spanish case, this request reveals a deep, atavistic insecurity about the viability of a shared project that doesn't depend on armed force and doesn't have to live under surveillance. It's a paradoxical weakness for someone who won a civil war, physically eliminated the opposition, and spoke of "unity of destiny." This insecurity resonates with some of today's speeches and with that passage where Juan Carlos explains that he sometimes had to rein in Jordi Pujol. Read now, it's pathetic.