What Happened to the Right's Only Big Victory

Franco won a civil war, dismantled the left, and ruled a functioning and adaptive state for nearly four decades. Why did nothing of his legacy survive and what does it means for us?

Francisco Franco was the most successful right-wing leader of the twentieth century.

He emerged victorious in the brutal Spanish Civil War, the only major conflict in modern Europe won by nationalist, counterrevolutionary forces. He then prevented his fragmented coalition from dissolving into competing factions. He physically eliminated the Republican leadership and purged all the Spanish leftists he could get his hands on.

There was to be no contrived national reconciliation on his watch. He smashed the left, which didn’t recover as a political force to challenge him in his lifetime.

He would go on to build an adaptive state that would prove a citadel against Communism and secularism. Franco had fought for Catholic Spain, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, for hierarchy and tradition, for Spain as civilizationally distinct and historically continuous. He won that fight in blood and consolidated the victory.

Then in 1975 he died. And everything he achieved began to be dismantled.

The Socialists won the 1982 general elections in a landslide with a mandate for sweeping change. The party’s leader, Alfonso Guerra, declared that “we are going to change Spain so radically that not even her own mother is going to recognize her.”

That promise was kept.

Within a generation, Spain had become yet another indistinguishable, self-hating liberal blob on the European landscape. It was one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. In 2005, the Socialist government first offered amnesty to migrants. Another half million are in line for amnesty now. The legacy of the Reconquista is simply being thrown away for nothing.

These days, the Spanish government is busy waging a relentless war against reminders of the Franco era. A state catalogue of “Francoist symbols and vestiges,” estimated to number 4,000, has been approved for removal or rebranding. Meanwhile, the murderous Communist left that Franco vanquished has, absurdly, been whitewashed as fighters for democracy. Many of them were Stalinists and their commitment to democracy was commensurate.

Photo: Francisco Franco, Wiki Commons.

The question is how this could happen. Explanations tend to appear in the familiar categories: betrayal, incompetence, or a misguided strategy. Those explanations are not necessarily wrong but they operate on a particular plane—the plane of human agency. They assume that history is primarily a contest between competing ideologies or broader civilizational orders, and that the fate of a system turns on whether those systems are faithfully upheld or effectively executed.

Offering a coherent post-mortem of the failure of the Franco project was the late French nationalist intellectual Dominique Venner. But it is an explanation that unfolds precisely on the plane of human agency: Franco failed by mismanaging the ideological core of the regime. According to Venner, he neutralized the Falange—the Spanish fascist-tinged nationalist movement—rather than allowing it to fully shape the state. After the death of its founder, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Franco appropriated his symbolic legacy while sidelining the movement’s independent leadership.

In Venner’s account, the Falange remained under suspicion because, in the eyes of the Catholic establishment, its association with fascist currents suggested a troubling “scent of paganism.” The regime’s ideological-symbolic foundation thus became misplaced. Instead of cultivating a vital nationalist doctrine, Franco fell back on traditional Catholicism, thereby subordinating the more dynamic ideological forces to the aim of stability and control.

The Church became the gatekeeper for cultural and intellectual matters, which, according to Venner, created a fatal vulnerability that would come back to haunt it. The regime had outsourced its ideological core to an institution that was neither dynamic nor, in the long run, reliable. When the Church pivoted after Vatican II, the rug was ripped out from under the regime’s foundation.

That pivot was most vivid in 1971, when Cardinal Tarancón from the moderate camp was elected president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference. The Church would henceforth openly demand liberalization and democratization of the regime. Perhaps nothing better symbolizes the rupture between the Church and the Franco regime than a famous incident at the funeral of a government official killed by Basque terrorists, when segments of the Francoist hard right gave the presiding cardinal a harsh welcome, shouting: “Tarancón al paredon” (“Up against the wall.”). The once-potent anticlericalism of the left, now waning, was picked up by the right out of resentment at the betrayal of a Church that had been given such an exalted position.

Gone, Venner concludes, were:

…the crusade against Communism and the celebration of the fatherland, order, and authority. In its stead came a humanitarian phraseology in harmony with the Christian redemption of the poor and the déclassés. All that would remain of the old reactionary arsenal would be the rejection of the contraception, a meager legacy, one must concede, for maintaining the national cause.

What Venner is saying is that Franco planted the seed of the regime’s eventual demise at the beginning. The implication, though, is that a fully realized right-wing revolutionary order was possible, but Franco prevented it from emerging.

But to accept Venner’s premise is to say that it wasn’t enough to win a civil war against a vicious and ideologically charged enemy with substantial international sympathy; consolidate the victory by eliminating the opposition while building a functioning and stable state; navigate treacherous geopolitical waters, somehow managing at various times to engage with forces as varied as Hitler and NATO; and go on to rule for decades without facing a serious challenge—all while presiding over a period of rapid economic growth (the so-called “Spanish Miracle”).

That’s an elite performance, and yet within Venner’s framework it is insufficient. Franco apparently also needed to found a fully coherent and incandescent ideological-symbolic order at the outset, resist the pressures of compromise required to hold his fragile coalition together, preserve ideological intensity across generations, and prevent institutional drift. He would also have had to anticipate the pathologies that lay ahead, such as the Catholic Church, despite having been subject to intense persecution during the Republican period, eventually switching sides.

That is asking a lot. In any case, Venner’s critique boils down to an assumption that the central problems confronting the regime were ideological in nature, and that different choices early on might have provided a different outcome.

An assumption of our abstraction-heavy age is that history is best understood as a contest of competing ideologies (or more broadly civilizational-symbolic orders). We tend to largely bracket out the structural frames as being secondary effects somewhere downstream. Venner certainly operates within this assumption, although he unwittingly concedes something about the prevailing structural conditions by implying that only an absolutely flawless, godlike visionary could give the right any chance at longevity of rule.

In reality, it is ideology that is constrained by structural frames, not the other way around. These frames comprise the deeper conditions of social life: the energy base of a society, the scale and organization of economic activity, demographic dynamics, and the complexity of institutions.

A focus on the abstract realm of ideology and symbolic content leaves underexplored precisely this deeper level. In the postwar period, the developed world, buoyed by a massive input of surplus energy—the height of the oil age—was moving in lockstep toward rising material capacity and increasing integration. Patterns of life and social fabrics that had been woven over centuries began to dissolve under conditions of urbanization and expanding prosperity. Out of this emerged mass consumption and a pervasive media environment, which in turn served to individualize behavior and atomize society. These were stiff headwinds for any closed, symbolically rich system aiming to be the organizing force of a society.

How the Franco regime dealt with the actual limits it faced says a lot about where the range of possibility actually lay. The decisive constraints were not ideological. Internationally isolated, Franco had pursued economic self-reliance in the 1940s in the name of sovereignty. But it was a time of deprivation. The economy was plagued by shortages, severe trade imbalances, and high inflation. In the decade after the Civil War, parts of the country experienced near-famine conditions.

Things came to a head in the 1950s, particularly as Spanish society was no longer in a post-civil war mobilization mindset. Importantly, these economic problems were not occurring in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of a rapidly integrating and increasingly prosperous postwar world. The gap between Spain’s condition and that broader trajectory imposed its own logic: any viable solution would have to move in that direction.

Francoism was thus forced into administrative and economic problem-solving that was no longer legible within the regime’s symbolic-civilizational narrative. In 1957, Franco reshuffled his government and, for the first time, brought in a new cohort of more technocratic ministers. The old guard had been well-suited for the crucible of the early years; it was ill-suited for the era dawning.

The men who came to positions of prominence in this technocratic turn are often referred to as Franco’s “Opus Dei ministers.” Opus Dei, a Catholic organization founded in Spain in 1928, operated under the principle that God is encountered within the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life. Implicit in this was an acceptance of the professions and disciplines of the modern world.

It was precisely this kind of figure who now entered government. Several ministers were Opus Dei members, and so-called opusdeístas staffed key areas of administration. They were committed Catholics, but also technically trained administrators rather than ideological militants. In material terms, they made the system function; in doing so they aligned Spain with the Western economic and financial architecture. Alignment with the rest of the Western baggage was now a matter of time.

Trade and current account controls were liberalized, and the economy was opened to foreign investment. In the 1960s, tourism boomed. Television sets became ever more frequent in households, and the number of telephones per capita nearly doubled. Economic life began to move outward along multiple axes at once, which generated an intense centrifugal pressure.

Photo: Benidorm Beach, Spain. 1960. Wiki Commons.

Even as it continued to speak the old language of a historically Catholic civilization restored after revolutionary rupture, Spain was becoming imbedded in the sprawling web of modernity. This necessarily meant a thinning of the symbolic core. When you end up around a table talking balance of payments with IMF officials, it no longer matters much whether you’re Catholic or a hardcore Falangist. The underlying reality has already shifted. It is, in a very real sense, a different world.

The regime had been pre-modern in symbolic content but came to be modern in method of administration. It had no choice. Over time, method always prevails over content. A traditional order cannot be preserved while the material base beneath it is transformed. It is said the left came back stronger than ever after Franco died. Really, it simply walked right into a space no longer occupied, much less defended.

One can admire the Nationalists’ victory in the Civil War and assert with confidence that in preventing the Communists from taking power, a worse fate for Spain was avoided. Conflict is a part of the human condition and it is better to win than to lose. But this is entirely separate from the question of sustainability.

Franco still spoke in explicitly civilizational terms but could only briefly freeze a historical moment whose time had passed. Today, everyone moves within the terrain Franco’s Spain was converging toward at the end. The administrative state is universally accepted; the aim is no more ambitious than to adjust its parameters in one direction or another.

What Franco’s Spain revealed is the impossibility of sustaining a pre-modern civilizational form in a modern society. In medieval Europe, Catholicism did not need to be imposed or defended; it was the organizing principle of society and couldn’t have been otherwise. By the twentieth century, it required extraordinary political will—and then constant adaptation, compromise, and coercion—just to approximate what had once been self-sustaining.

It is tempting to ponder the road not taken: perhaps an intense and vital nationalism instead of an enervated Catholicism, as Venner seemed to want. But the oil age had its own logic. The era of rich symbolic forms had receded into the past, not to return anytime soon. The suited men of the IMF were going to come no matter what to talk about trade balances and capital controls.

It still matters who is running the state—even a technocratic one with a low civilizational horizon. It’s hard to imagine anyone worse than the batch in power now. They care nothing for the native people of the lands they govern and are profoundly detrimental even within the narrow range of possibilities available. They aren’t even very competent technocrats.

In this stripped-down and civilizationally impoverished landscape—more dysfunctional and heterogeneous by the day—the deeper organizing force is increasingly becoming demographics and access to resources. It’s not even a matter of left versus right anymore. What matters is simply sticking together as a people. The twilight of the oil age will offer new possibilities.

Those still squabbling over the big civilizational forms of the past—Christian or otherwise—with an eye toward reanimating them in the service of statecraft are entirely out of synch with the times. Such battles can’t be won. To paraphrase William Faulkner, they can’t even be fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Cover photo: Valley of the Fallen, Spain. Sigils, Wiki Commons