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There is something faintly preposterous about the pairing of these names—Franco and Hitler—so radically different in scale and in the range of associations they evoke. And yet, as Stanley Payne shows in Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II, published earlier this year by Yale University Press, we can profit greatly from an account of their peculiar connection.
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Payne is perhaps the foremost American historian of 20th-century Spain. Now emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he has written books on the Falange (the Spanish fascist party founded in the early 1930s), on the Franco regime, on Spanish Catholicism, and on Basque nationalism, among others, as well as a comparative study of fascism. Several of his books shed light on the Spanish Civil War, "probably the most mythic event of the twentieth century," as he observes in Franco and Hitler, and the only event in modern Spanish history with which the general reader is likely to be moderately familiar. (No wonder, then, that popular images of that conflict deal almost exclusively in caricatures.)
In part because modern Spanish history is largely ignored (so that we don't come to it with the background we bring to accounts of France or Germany or Russia or even Italy in the 20th century), and in part because any history seen up close is messy and complicated, Payne's books require multiple readings (unless the reader in question is a fellow specialist). The first time through The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936: Origins of the Civil War (published by Yale in 2006), I had to reread many pages on the spot, so dizzying were the acronyms representing the wild variety of political parties. But the books are worth the effort, and the more you read, the more players you recognize. And if you are moving back and forth between Payne's own books and books by other historians covering some of the same territory, you will increasingly appreciate his scrupulously nonpartisan approach.
Here are some of the salient points that emerge in Franco and Hitler. First, the distinctive character of fascism in Spain was bound up with Catholicism. The early months of the Civil War, when the violence was most intense, "produced the most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western history, in some ways even more intense than that during the French Revolution." Don't suppose that Payne romanticizes the Nationalist cause—not in the least. He is quite clear about the orgies of violence on the other side as well, directed against Republicans. But unlike many historians—Antony Beevor, for example, in his recent history of the Civil War—Payne doesn't gloss over or rationalize the murderous anti-Catholic rampages. Within a very short time, lines were drawn such that Catholics—even those who had been sympathetic to the Republic—identified with the Nationalist cause:
The military soon responded in kind, and before long their whole cause became closely identified with Catholicism. Franco's troops were soon participating en masse in open-air misas de campana (field masses). La Cruzada would eventually become an official synonym for the entire war effort. Catholicism, not fascism, became the main emotional, psychological and even to some extent ideological support of the Nacionales.
Moreover, there was a marked anti-modern spirit to the movement, a
neotraditionalist revival that affected all culture and mores—even if its effects were often more apparent than real. An equivalent neotraditionalist revivalism had never taken place so officially or extensively in any other Catholic country in modern times, or for that matter in any Christian country during the preceding century.
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