2023-04-25 01:02:25
José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was exhumed this Monday from Valle de Cuelgamuros, created in the fall of 1933 with little means and less social support Falange, a national syndicalist political movement that fused Italian fascism with patriotic elements such as the defense of the unity of Spain or the preeminence of catholicism, but separating Church and State. A year earlier, the dictator’s son had come into contact with the fascism of Mussoliniwhom he visited in Rome, and had begun to look for a way to import that regime into Spain through parliamentary or extra-parliamentary channels.
During the formal founding of the Falange in Madrid’s Teatro de la Comedia, Primo de Rivera asked that «the political parties disappear. No one has ever been born a member of a political party; instead we are all born members of a family; we are all neighbors of a municipality; we all strive in the exercise of a job…».
In 1934, Falange would merge with the National-Syndicalist Offensive Juntasthe minority group that until then had represented fascism in Spain through the figure of Ramiro Ledesma and Onésimo Redondo, and writers such as Ernesto Gimenez Caballero and Rafael Sanchez Mazas. This second group had been born earlier and had a certain union base, but the Falange had, within its limitations, more financial support and better connections with Mussolini, which would send money for its growth. Consequently, from the beginning a fight broke out for the command of the party between José Antonio, Onesimo and Ledesma Ramos where the former had the upper hand.
Ledesma considered Primo de Rivera a “gentleman” too close to the monarchists and proposed in the First National Congress of the Falange snatch the leadership, but José Antonio shook off the triumvirate quite easily. Primo de Rivera emerged as the main leader and icon of this extreme movement with little electoral support but with a great presence on the street. With his hands free, he placed the veteran Jonsistas in the third amphitheater, in such a way that they were not long in beginning their outward journey. José Antonio Primo de Rivera took the lead in expelling them after ensuring the loyalty of the CONS trade unionists, a union closely linked to the taxi, transport and hotel industry, and the important core of the party in Valladolid.
Alfonso García-Valdecasas, Julio Ruiz de Alda and José Antonio Primo de Rivera at the Falange Foundation.
As the leader of fascism in Spain, he briefly met Hitler, but the führer did not cause him a favorable impression. His ideology differed on many points from the Nazi movement, although on others it coincided. Primo de Rivera wanted a “national revolution” based on a totalitarian state, with strong economic interventionism, including the nationalization of the financial system and public services; he also believed that the family, the municipality and the corporation should be the main subjects of politics and he hoped to get the separation of church and state.
The electoral results never supported the Falange (José Antonio obtained a deputy certificate in 1933, although he represented a conservative party from Cádiz), but the radicalization of the communist, socialist and anarchist youth placed their anti-liberal militants in the eye of the street hurricane and revolutionary. Not in vain, as the historian remembers Julio Gil Pecharromán In the biographical entry dedicated to José Antonio in the RAH, he “personally opposed the exercise of indiscriminate violence, but ended up giving in to the pressures of his environment and, after the murder of one of the youth cadres of the party, Matias Monteroauthorized a harsh policy of reprisals that reached one of its culminating points with the shooting death, in the middle of the street, of the young socialist Juana Rico»
The youth of the FE acquired a paramilitary structure and were armed with “bicycles”, a euphemism for pistols at the time, and flexible metal-lined batons. In addition, they never hesitated to use adolescents in their actions, as demonstrated by the death in a confrontation with firearms of the high school student Jesus Hernandez fifteen years old. Violence was an offer they did not want to refuse.
All this forced the illegalization of the party accused of being “responsible for public disorder”
In the February 1936 elections, the FE reaped an electoral disaster (0.4% of the vote) and the Falangist leader was left out of Parliament. However, the party grew in the streets where it had no voice in parliament. After the attack, on March 11, 1936, against Law professor and socialist militant Jiménez de Asúa, carried out by a Falangist militant, the municipal judge handling the case was assassinated by Falangist gunmen, causing a great scandal among the authorities. All of this forced the banning of the party accused of being “responsible for public disorder.” Its leaders, including Primo de Rivera, were imprisoned in Madrid. The Civil War caught its leader behind bars.
The leaders of the Spanish Falange negotiated their participation in the July 1936 coup that led to the war. José Antonio demanded that his formation play a crucial role in the contest and not be subordinated, as it finally happened, to a group that he considered conservative monarchists. The conspiring generals denied this demand to the Falangist leader, who finally gave the green light to the entry of his group to stop what he believed to be a budding Marxist revolution.
Parade in 1941 of a group of Falangists in Madrid.
Before the war, the party had fewer than 10,000 members and was not a notable force, but by Christmas 1936 it was already made up of half a million men. In 1937 the party was forced to accept by force the Unification Decree which by order of Franco merged it with the rest of the political forces of the national side in a single party, Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. Franco rose as its leader despite the fact that an important sector of the Falange expressed its discontent with what it correctly interpreted as an attempt to use its doctrine for its own interests.
Manuel Hedilla, successor to José Antonio after his execution in an Alicante prison the first year of the war, was arrested along with 600 other Falangists accused of conspiring against Franco for not accepting unification. The war itself, where more than 60% of party members died, contributed to the fact that the ‘Old Shirts’ were silenced from the party leadership. Nevertheless, thousands of Spaniards would fight in the Falangist Flags (battalions) and they would enjoy great power until the end of World War II, when the defeat of the Axis in 1945 marked the decline of this group within the regime.
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