The body of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who founded Spain’s fascist party in 1933, is being exhumed. For 63 years, his carcass occupied the place of honor in the Valley of the Fallen, the vast mausoleum built by Francisco Franco as a memorial to the civil war dead. Jose Antonio’s remains lay next to Franco’s, the two rightist leaders surrounded by the remains of soldiers who died on both sides, like twin pharaohs compassed in death by the mingled corpses of their servants and their foes.
Spain’s socialist government understandably objected to these arrangements, prompting Jose Antonio’s family to take his body and inter him with Catholic rites. It feels as if Spain’s post-war compromises and pieties are being buried with him.
Jose Antonio’s short life is a symbol of Spain’s 20th-century tragedy, a reminder of how fortunate we are to live under the rule of law. It is also a warning of how easily democracies can slide into civil war.
His father, Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera, had been Spain’s dictator between 1923 and 1930. There have, I suppose, been harsher dictatorships. Miguel was a kind of church-and-king Tory, fond of tweed suits and English country houses. When he fell, the monarchy fell with him, and Spaniards embarked on their ultimately catastrophic arguments about what constituted a legitimate regime.
Monarchists and republicans, conservatives and liberals, fascists and communists each pressed their claims. No one could agree to a common set of rules. Large chunks of the Left refused to accept the Right’s election victory in 1933, just as large chunks of the Right refused to accept the Left’s victory in 1936. Eventually, the issue was settled by violence.
Students who had argued philosophy at cafe tables suddenly found themselves shooting at each other in trenches. Some died in combat; others were rounded up and killed when one side or the other seized territory. Perhaps half a million Spaniards lost their lives.
Jose Antonio’s story was, at least in this respect, typical. He was arrested by the left-wing government before the military uprising and charged with the illegal possession of a firearm (most Spanish politicians owned guns at that time). When the fighting began, he was summarily executed for having backed the rising, even though it had started while he was in prison.
Many Spaniards shared his fate — execution without due process. Some had voted the wrong way, others were priests, others were trade unionists, others had the wrong family connections, and others were victims of local grudges. Only afterward did the former playboy become an icon.
Franco had had little time for Jose Antonio in life, seeing him as an overprivileged fop. But, in death, he became a useful means of binding the fascists to Franco’s cause. Although leftists tend to call all Franco’s supporters “fascists,” the generalisimo drew much of his support from Catholic traditionalists and monarchists. The differences between these conservatives and Jose Antonio’s followers (known as Falangists) were huge. The Falangists, like all fascists, favored socialist economics. They saw themselves as working-class revolutionaries and had no time for priests or princes. So Franco turned Jose Antonio (a good-looking man, 33 when he was shot) into a cult figure, referring to him as El Ausente (the Missing One) and thereby reminding the Falangists that he and they had common enemies.
When Franco died, the Spaniards had good reason to want to put the whole foul episode behind them. The Valley of the Fallen symbolized, for a while, the new national mood. It was originally conceived as a memorial to Franco’s troops and built with the forced labor of republican prisoners. But by the time it was consecrated, the dead of the two sides were deliberately commingled, a reminder of their common nationality.
As the last of the wartime generation passes, the polite evasions on which the postwar settlement rested are being abandoned. Jose Antonio is now remembered, not as a lost leader, but as a fascist politician who was spectacularly unlucky.
Spaniards remain acutely aware of how quickly polarizing disputes can escalate. They understand that demonizing your opponents can lead to demonic outcomes. “Spain is divided between the Anti-Exers, who back Z, and the Anti-Zee-ers, who back X,” wrote the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno weeks before the fighting started. Sound familiar?
Culture wars are about identity. Spain in the 1930s saw a conflict between churchgoers and anti-clericals that eventually subsumed other conflicts (monarchy versus republic, unionist versus separatist, private property versus common ownership). Again, sound familiar?
Above all, it showed what happens when elections are treated as contingent, as something to accept only if your side happens to win. That lesson, above all, surely should not need to be retaught.
