In Europe

Portuguese professor-dictator António Salazar and the modern young people who favoured a popular movement along the lines of Mussolini's. And through it all ran the dividing line between radicals and non-radicals. Salazar, Franco, the Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas and even Mussolini allowed the old existing order more or less to go on existing, and even won authority because of that. The German and Austrian Nazis were much more radical; they had absolutely no interest in making compromises, either with the church or with any other established order.
    José Antonio, in fact, occupied a position somewhere between the two camps, but he was not fond of the Nazis. He considered them a ‘turgid expression of German Romanticism’. Mussolini interested him much more: the Italian leader had actually been able to develop a modern, right-wing form of government without the maladies of class and democracy. Still, in his later articles and speeches, José Antonio systematically avoided the term ‘fascism’. For his movement he favoured an authentic, Spanish form, and he attempted to reconcile tradition and the modern age, secularisation and religion, regional autonomy and central authority, mysticism and rationality.
    From 1934, José Antonio began giving more serious consideration to an armed revolt. Late in that year he wrote a ‘postcard to a Spanish soldier’, addressing it to several senior army officers: in it, he said that the Spanish bourgeoisie had been poisoned by foreign ideas, that the proletarian masses were under the spell of Marxism, and that the military was the only group capable of filling the vacuum of this ‘non-existent state’. The generals paidhim little heed. The most important among them, Franco, paid him no heed whatsoever. In September 1935, however, the plans grew more serious. At the Parador de Gredos, close to Madrid, he and his colleagues developed a complete scenario for a coup, to be led by the Falange. (That same plan was actually carried out in part one year later, but then by the army.) And as though the Devil had a hand in it: it was at that same hotel, during those same days, that his great love Pilar Azlor de Aragón spent her wedding night with her new husband, an aristocrat and a naval officer. She had capitulated at last. For José Antonio it was, in his own words, ‘the most horrific night of my life’.
    Almost six months later, in February 1936, he was arrested along with a few other Falangists. The charge was clearly trumped up: the authorities said they had broken a seal the police had put on the door of their headquarters. But other charges quickly followed: illegal assembly, illegal possession of firearms and – after an emotional outburst – contempt of court. At last, on 6 June, José Antonio spat a pure declaration of war in the face of the republican government: ‘There are no more peaceful solutions.’ And: ‘So let there be this war, this violence, in which we not only defend the existence of the Falange, but the very existence of Spain itself.’ He himself, however, remained torn by inner doubt. He realised all too well that the revolt could fail, clearing the way for a long and disastrous civil war.
    Meanwhile, the violence in the streets came to a head. In the night of 13 July, 1936, the monarchist parliamentarian José Calvo Sotelo was abducted by a handful of socialist militia members and, in true Soviet style, executed with a bullet to the back of his head. In some ways the attack was the mirror image of the murder of the Italian parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti twelve years earlier. Like Matteotti, Sotelo was a prominent politician, and the reactions were equally vehement. There was a difference, however: Mussolini had been able to pilot his government safely through that crisis, but with this murder the Spanish republicans forfeited the last chance of a peaceful solution. Less than a week later, the civil war began.
    Those who went to war against each other in Spain were of widely varied backgrounds. There were law-abiding Catholics who defended the republic. There were equally upstanding Catholics who fought along with Franco.By way of the Comintern, the Soviet-controlled Communist International, some 40,000 volunteers to the International Brigade had been recruited to go to war against fascism. The young anarchists, on the other hand, wanted more: they were striving for a revolution of their own. Spanish farm boys fought against their landlords.