Personality and Power by Ian Kershaw

Author:Ian Kershaw [Kershaw, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Legacy

Franco was unquestionably an outstanding military leader, as he showed in the 1920s in Morocco and then later in directing the nationalist forces in the Civil War. But his qualities of political leadership were invisible before the late 1930s. Without the specific conditions prevailing in Spain at the time they would almost certainly have remained so.

He was given the opportunity to gain power by the class equilibrium in Spain during the Second Republic, when neither the forces of Left nor those of the Right could prevail.[60] The Civil War then propelled him to military leadership of the nationalist rebels. For over three decades as head of state, his main ability was the skill to sustain his own hold on power by dividing and manipulating the component sectors of the power-cartel. His unchallengeable authority was immensely bolstered by the ‘heroic’ personality cult that was manufactured around him. Whether or not belief in Franco was genuine or contrived, a sizeable (if unquantifiable) proportion of the population bought into the Caudillo cult, as did – often cynically, no doubt – the elites who stood to gain from the dictatorship. The public image hid the reality: a personality which in a different era would have left no mark on history.

After the war, maintaining power, more or less for its own sake – along with accruing the vast wealth that he amassed in the process in a system that depended on corruption on the grand scale – was what the dictatorship largely amounted to. There was no longer any great ideological dynamic behind it once the internal enemies had been ruthlessly and vengefully destroyed. A belief in patriotism, religion, unity and order was what remained.[61] Franco had admired and identified with Mussolini and Hitler. But his enthusiasm for the Axis was officially erased once the increasingly inevitable victory of the Allies rendered it counterproductive. His fantasy about the international Masonic conspiracy persisted, but, whatever its reflection of Franco’s weird mind-set, had no practical implications.[62] When circumstances demanded a rapprochement with the USA, the centre in his eyes of nebulous Masonic power, his personal paranoia played no part in a policy-shift determined by the needs of pragmatic adjustment to geopolitical realities.

As the years, then the decades passed, Franco’s own energies for ruling faded even while he held on tenaciously to power. His interest in the daily grind of government diminished and he spent increasing amounts of time indulging his hobbies of hunting, deep-sea fishing and, in the final years, when he was increasingly beset by ill-health, watching television and doing the football pools (which he sometimes won).[63] The dictatorship continued to function, however, not least because it still served the interests of Spain’s ruling classes, while the compliance of the bulk of the population was underpinned by increased living standards resulting from the belated economic growth. And Franco retained the well-rewarded loyalty of the military and security apparatus.

It was increasingly obvious, however, that the forces of modernization were overtaking the outmoded authoritarianism of the system. This was recognized by all sections of the power-elites.

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