In Europe

the mountain appeared only now and then from the clouds,showers clattered down on the immense forecourt. The visitors gazed in awe at the crucifixes painted in blood, the rigid faces of the Virgins, the lamps in the form of whetted swords, at the bodies stretched out on the altar of the fallen, and at the endless, empty stone expanse before this blasphemous temple where Spain still comes to pray.
    It is one of history's most macabre jokes, this common resting place for two men who could not stand each other in life. This cult of martyrdom, unlike anything else in modern Europe, in no way fits the intellectual José Antonio. Franco, however, is another case: he could not have cared less, all he needed was a symbol and so, without the slightest hesitation, he annexed all those traits of José Antonio's that he did not himself possess.
    José Antonio enjoyed nightlife, risks and women. Franco was a mama's boy who detested the escapades of his skirt-chasing father. José Antonio was an impassioned politician. Franco was an unscrupulous pragmatist, who placed power above all else, a brilliant opportunist, and at the same time a typical ‘little man’, scarred for life by the lower middle class’ rancour towards the casual privileges of the aristocracy. ‘Down with the intellectuals.’ This was the creed on which he had been suckled in the Foreign Legion.
    At the end of his life, José Antonio tried desperately but fruitlessly to close the lid on the chest of demons he had opened. Franco kept the tightest control over the story of his own life; in that regard he was an uncommonly gifted manipulator. His military career during the days of the republic, the coup, the bloodbaths after the civil war, the defeat of his political allies in the Second World War, the American plans to liberate Spain in 1945 (scotched by Churchill at the last moment) and a dictatorship covering almost forty years; Franco got away with it all.
    And so too with José Antonio's legacy. Up to the moment of the coup itself, Franco was not interested in the Falange Española. That interest was only aroused when the movement began growing by leaps and bounds. Within a few weeks, more than half of Franco's volunteer troops consisted of Falangists. Ultimately, more than 170,000 Spaniards would join the Falangist militia. At the same time, after José Antonio's death, the movement went increasingly awry. The party bosses flaunted fascist symbols, donned extravagant uniforms and terrorised the cities in stolen limousines.The party organs even began adopting the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was cited eagerly and often.
    Franco had no difficulty in co-opting this runaway movement within the space of only a few months, and incorporating it into his new Falange. Suddenly the general spoke with pride of his close ties with José Antonio, suddenly an entire body of myth had been created around the Falangist pioneer and his ‘natural heir’ Franco. In reality, the general had not lifted a finger to free José Antonio from his cell; it had not been in his interests. In fact, when the perfect opportunity to free him with the help of the German Navy presented itself in October 1936, Franco raised so many objections that the operation was called off. And when his Falangist rival was executed, the general kept that fact under wraps. Franco's propaganda machine made skilful use of José Antonio's prolonged absence. In private, Franco even suggested that José Antonio may have been handed over to the Russians, ‘and it is possible that they've castrated him’. Only in November 1938 was his death publicly confirmed.
    In his cell, immediately after the outbreak of the civil war, José Antonio wrote an analysis of Spain's future, should the nationalists win that war. ‘A group of generals of honourable intentions but of abysmal political mediocrity … And behind them: Old Carlism, intransigent, boorish, antipathetic; the conservative classes, fixed on their own interests, shortsighted, lazy; agrarian and finance capitalism, that is to say: the end for many years of any possibility of building a modern Spain; the lack of any national sense of long-range perspective.’
    His Falange became the stalking horse for all this. In the end, it was also to become the longest lived right wing totalitarian movement in Europe; from the first small groups to its dismantling in 1977, forty-six years in all.

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