The FET y de las JONS has its origins in three parties: the Spanish Falange, aFalangist party, The Council of National Syndicalist Offensives, anational syndicalist party, andTraditionalist Communion, aCatholicmonarchist party. These parties were becoming relevant in Spanish right wing politics before the civil war. The Spanish Falange and the Council of National Syndicalist Offensives were relatively small, and merged into the Spanish Falange de la JONS leading up to the 1936 election. As civil war broke out, the Falange grew rapidly in membership, and the Traditionalist Communion, already a prominent force, mobilized its forces to fight the leftist government.[citation needed]
With the eruption of theCivil War in July 1936, the Falange fought on the side of theNationalist faction against theSecond Spanish Republic. Expanding rapidly from several thousand to several hundred thousand,[35] the Falange's male membership was accompanied by a female auxiliary, theSección Femenina. Led by José Antonio's sisterPilar Primo de Rivera, this latter subsidiary organization claimed more than a half million members by the end of the war and provided nursing and support services for the Nationalist forces.[36]
The party was commanded byManuel Hedilla following the death or imprisonment of the original leaders by theRepublicans. Among them wasJosé Antonio Primo de Rivera who was referred to among the leadership asel Ausente, ("the Absent One"). After being sentenced to death on 18 November 1936, Primo de Rivera was executed on 20 November 1936 (a date since known as20-N in Spain), giving himmartyr status among the Falangists. This conviction and sentence was possible since he'd lost his parliamentary immunity as his party did not receive enough votes during the last elections.[citation needed]
On April 19, 1937,Franco issued aUnification Decree, which forcibly merged the Falange with theCarlistComunión Tradicionalista to form theFalange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS (FET y de las JONS). Franco assumed the role ofjefe nacional ("National Chief"), following the model of a fascist party.[37][note 5] All other parties supporting the rebel faction were disbanded, but former members of those parties were free to join the FET as individual members. The new party's official ideology was the Falangists'27 puntos—reduced after the unification to 26, the article barring mergers being dropped. The merged party incorporated many Falangist symbols–the blue shirt, the yoked arrows, the red and black flag, and the anthemCara al Sol among others.[39] Despite this, the party was in fact a wide-ranging nationalist coalition, closely controlled by Franco. Parts of the original Falange (including Hedilla) and many Carlists did not join the unified party. Franco had sought to control the Falange after a clash between Hedilla and his main critics within the group, thelegitimistas ofAgustín Aznar andSancho Dávila y Fernández de Celis, that threatened to derail the Nationalist war effort.[40] Franco becamejefe nacional and "Supreme Caudillo" of the FET. He was vested with "the most absolute authority," including the power to name his successor, and was only responsible to "God and history."[41]
None of the other vanquished parties in the war suffered as many deaths among their leaders as the Falange. 60% of the pre-war Falange membership lost their lives in the war.[citation needed]
However, most of the property of all other parties andtrade unions were assigned to the party. In 1938, all trade unions were unified under Falangist command.[citation needed]
Visit of Franco to Tolosa in 1948. The podium is decorated with theyoke and arrows, the symbol of theSindicato Vertical and theCross of Burgundy.
After the war, the party was charged with developing an ideology for Franco's regime. This job became acursus honorum for ambitious politicians—new converts, who were calledcamisas nuevas ("new shirts") in opposition to the more overtly populist and ideological "old shirts" from before the war.[citation needed]
Membership in the Falange/FET reached a peak of 932,000 in 1942.[6] Despite the official unification of the various Nationalist factions within the party in 1937, tensions continued between dedicated Falangists and other groups, particularlyCarlists. Such tensions erupted in violence with theBegoña Incident of August 1942, when hardline Falangist activists attacked a Carlist religious gathering inBilbao with grenades. The attack and the response of government ministers with Carlist leanings (most notablyJosé Enrique Varela andValentín Galarza) led to a government crisis and caused Franco to dismiss several ministers. Ultimately, six Falangists were convicted of the attack and one, Juan Domínguez, was executed.[42]
By the middle of theSecond World War, Franco and leading Falangists, while distancing themselves from the faltering European fascists, stressed the unique "Spanish Catholic authoritarianism" of the regime and the Falange. Instructions were issued in September 1943 that henceforth the Falange/FET would be referred to exclusively as a "movement" and not a "party".[43]
With improving relations with the United States,economic development and the rise of a group of relatively youngtechnocrats within the government, the Falange continued to decline. In 1965, the SEU, the movement's student organization, was officially disbanded.[44] At the same time, the membership of the Falange as a whole was both shrinking and aging. In 1974, the average age of Falangists in Madrid was at least 55 years. The organization's relatively few new members came mostly from the conservative and devoutly Catholic areas of northern Spain.[45]
^José Antonio Primo de Rivera's brand of fascism was "a full fascism,[18] based on a mythical conception of a regenerative, populist and ultranationalist revolution, oriented to the construction of a totalitarian State as the basis and foundation of an orderly and enthusiastic, hierarchical and conquering national community. This is the lowest common denominator of all fascisms, and Primo de Rivera's covered it more than sufficiently".[19]
Blinkhorn 2003, pp. 10–11: "the Franco regime-the only European regime with amajor radical fascist ingredient to survive long beyond 1945, and studied here byPaul Preston—is a useful example. Notwithstanding the aforementionedfascisant tendencies within the Spanish Catholic and monarchist right, radical fascism, in the form of the Falange (fused from 1934 with the JONS), was weak until 1936 when it began to expand rapidly, not least through the recruitment of disillusioned JAP-ists. [...] The product, like the Italian Fascist regime, was a compromise between radical fascism and conservative authoritarianism, in this case with unambiguous military and Church support. As Preston indicates, Falangism played a superficially prominent and important role for as long as it suited Franco, that is, until the mid-1940s, thereafter to be shunned into the sidings of Spanish political life.";
Griffin & Feldman 2004, pp. 82–83;Albanese & Hierro 2016, p. 54: "It was the FET-JONS, the main actor in Spain, which wanted the full fascistization of the country and which was most active during the period in trying to achieve it through the so-called 'syndicalist revolution'. This should not come as a surprise;Falange did not need the fascistization process, since it was already fully fascist from the beginning. Further, relations betweenFalange and Italy had become increasingly stronger since the Spanish Civil War, to the extent that Mussolini saw the Spanish party at the main vehicle capable of transforming Spain into a fully fascist country. Similarly, FET-jons also regarded Mussolini's Italy as its main point of reference and even asked the authorities in Rome for advice about carrying out the fascistization process of the Francoist regime as effectively as possible.";
Thomàs 2020, pp. 38–39: "Al referirnos a fascismo español lo hacemos a dos organizaciones diferentes. En primer lugar al partido fascista Falange Española de las JONS, que existió entre 1934 y el 19 de abril de 1937; y en segundo, al partido único del régimen franquista, Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, creado el último día citado y subsistente durante toda la vigencia del Franquismo -ni más ni menos que hasta abril de 1977, aunque en 1958 trocó su denominación por la de Movimiento Nacional. Existieron así dos organizaciones fascistas diferentes, aunque la segunda nació en parte de la primera y la integró." ["When we refer to Spanish fascism, we refer to two different organisations. Firstly, the national syndicalist party Falange Española de las JONS, which existed between 1934 and 19 April 1937; and secondly, the sole party of the Franco regime, Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, created on the latter day and which lasted throughout the duration of Francoism - no more and no less than until April 1977, although in 1958 it changed its name to the National Movement. Thus, there were two different fascist organisations, although the second was born in part from the first and integrated it."]
^Later, after the establishment ofFET y de las JONS, it was called theDelegación Nacional del Servicio Exterior de Falange (DNSEF; National Delegation of the Phalanx Foreign Service).[30]
^According toEnrique Moradiellos, Franco's rule asjefe nacional could be split into three periods: the first one, parallel to the period with the greatest level of fascistization of the regime, marked by the preeminence ofRamón Serrano Suñer as right hand (1937–1941); the second one, in which Franco assumed a more active role (1941–1945) in the party affairs, with the first spell ofJosé Luis de Arrese as Secretary-General, and from 1945 until his death, the period in which Franco distanced from the daily affairs of an increasingly bureaucratic FET y de las JONS.[38]
^see e.g. González Cuevas 2008, pp. 1170–1171, Rodríguez Núñez 2013, Heleno Saña,Historia de la filosófia española, Madrid 2007,ISBN9788496710986, p. 255 and onwards, in popular discourse Pradera is "one of the icons and pilars of Francoism", seeABC 25.10.04, availablehere
^Gonzalo Redondo Galvez,Política, cultura y sociedad en la España de Franco, 1939–1975, vol. 1, Pamplona 1999,ISBN8431317132; according to the author, "el authoritarismo franquista no fue de signo fascista sino tradicionalista", according to another, "el authoritarismo franquista no fue de signo fascista sino tradicionalista", see Juan María Sanchez-Prieto,Lo que fué y lo que no fué Franco, [in:]Nueva Revista de Política, Cultura y Arte 69 (2000), pp. 30–38
^Badie, Bertrand;Berg-Schlosser, Dirk;Morlino, Leonardo, eds. (7 September 2011).International Encyclopedia of Political Science.SAGE Publications (published 2011).ISBN9781483305394. Retrieved9 September 2020.... fascist Italy ... developed a state structure known as the corporate state with the ruling party acting as a mediator between 'corporations' making up the body of the nation. Similar designs were quite popular elsewhere in the 1930s. The most prominent examples wereEstado Novo in Portugal (1932–1968) and Brazil (1937–1945), the AustrianStandestaat (1933–1938), and authoritarian experiments in Estonia, Romania, and some other countries of East and East-Central Europe,
^Carlisle, Rodney P., ed. (2005).The Encyclopedia of Politics: The Left and the Right. Vol. 2: The Right. Thousand Oaks, California; London; New Delhi:SAGE Publications. p. 633.
^Historians have discussed which of the Falange's qualities were most characteristic of the ideology. Stanley Payne maintains it's their vague and confusing ideas, (PAYNE, Stanley (1965)Sobre Falange Española. París: Ruedo Ibérico), while S. Ellwood believes Nationalism, Imperialism and Irrationalism to characterise their ideas, as stated inPrietas las filas. Historia de la Falange Española, 1933-1985. Grijalbo (found at"Periodista Digital ::". Archived fromthe original on 17 November 2007. Retrieved2 October 2019.)
^"THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR - Episode 4: Franco And The Nationalists (HISTORY DOCUMENTARY) (Timestamp 18:34)".youtube.com. July 23, 2014. Retrieved7 July 2024.Quoting Spanish FalangistNarciso Perales from an interview in 1983; "The Falange was a revolutionary movement which wanted to carry out profound changes in the Spanish society of those times. Changes which are still necessary today. José Antonio proclaimed a doctrine which resolved opposing doctrines in society. It upheld spiritual values and the belief in the fatherland as our common and universal destiny, and at the same time, it aimed for a social revolution. Theagrarian reform would turn the land over to the peasants so that the vision of giving the ownership of the land to those who work it would come true. Banks would be nationalized because it was considered unjust that the savings of all the Spanish people should be controlled by a few who dominated the economy of the country. [...]
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