The leader of the Spanish fascist movement
Falange Española. His father had been a military dictator in his own right, and the Falange joyously fell in with the army's attempted coup of July
1936 which became the
Spanish Civil War. José Antonio's untimely death later that year would make him the iconic
martyr of the Nationalist regime, while his old party became co-opted into
Francisco Franco's state.
Rising Son
José Antonio was born in
1903 in
Jérez de la Frontera, the
sherry capital of Spain around which his family's agricultural holdings were centred. As large landowners, or
latifundistas, his family were at the heart of
Andalucian society, and his uncle had earned the hereditary title of Marqués de Estrella for his part in ending the
Second Carlist War in
1878.
José's father,
Miguel Primo de Rivera, had been a general too, and in
1923 seized power in a classic military
pronunciamiento to avert the social revolution which many industrialists feared after several years of
industrial unrest in
Barcelona. Still a student at the
University of Madrid when the coup took place, the dictator's son took little active part in politics during Primo de Rivera's rule, but José Antonio was intensely loyal to his father, and developed a strong hostility towards the liberal
Republicans who criticised him.
Ever since
the French Revolution, Spanish liberals had looked to the
Enlightenment as their inspiration for reviving a moribund Spain. In
1930 as before, they hoped to introduce
parliamentary democracy and
disentangle the
Catholic Church from the state.
However, the liberals' aspirations were denounced by the right, who had decried their predecessors throughout the nineteenth century as
afrancesados, 'Frenchified' thinkers who were betraying Spanish traditions. In his disdain for intellectuals such as
Manuel Azaña, the characteristic figure of the early Second Republic, José Antonio was not alone.
From the outset, José Antonio associated himself with the Republicans' opponents, and in May 1930 was asked to become the vice-secretary general of the monarchist organisation
Unión Monárquica. The elder Primo de Rivera had already fallen from power, but another year of ineffective military rule would follow before King
Alfonso XIII fled the country and the Second Republic was constituted in April
1931.
José Antonio joined the Unión for the sake of rehabilitating his father, but soon found it a stronghold of aristocratic authoritarianism. Although he had by now inherited the title of Marqués de Estrella, he believed that the Unión's quaint conservatism belonged to the previous century, and that the semi-feudal social structure of southern Spain was no longer appropriate - but categorically rejected the socialist solutions of the left.
Spanish Phalanx
In October 1931 José Antonio ran for elections to the Spanish parliament, the
Cortes, in his own right. Standing in staunchly socialist
Madrid, he could hardly have expected to win the seat, and returned to his law firm after the elections. Azaña's seeming inability to solve Spain's social problems, chiefly the plight of
landless labourers in the south, confirmed his belief that democratic liberalism was bankrupt.
Tapping into a vein of right-wing
regenerationism which had been used to justify his father's coup, but giving it a twentieth-century twist, José Antonio came up with the far from original idea that an authoritarian leader was necessary to bring about the social transformation he anticipated.
Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, had developed Italian
fascism on similar terms, looking to reconstruct the state by means of
vertical syndicates of workers and employers. That said, José Antonio always rejected the charge that his politics were imported from abroad, and in turn received little attention on the only occasion when he visited
Hitler's
Berlin.
José Antonio spent 1933 searching for potential collaborators on the right, and made the acquaintance of the similarly idealistic
Julio Ruiz de Alda. Like the Italian fascist
Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ruiz was a renowned aviator - the novelty of the
aeroplane chimed particularly well with fascism's
cult of action - and had turned against the Republic when it suspended government aid for his project to make an aerial survey of Spain. In August 1933, the duo founded Falange Española, or Spanish
Phalanx; its initials,
FE, spelt out the Spanish word for
faith.
FE was officially launched in October 1933, at a rally where José Antonio also announced that he would run for the Cortes in the Andalucian city of
Cádiz. This time, he won his seat, as part of a Cortes dominated by the right wing which promptly reversed the reforms of Azaña's Republican-socialist coalition. In parliament, José Antonio had little to say, except where his father's record was concerned.
Instead, he saved his overblown rhetoric for the Falange, and his inaugural address praised the
patria as a 'transcendent synthesis' of classes, looked forward to the disappearance of political parties, and vowed that the Falangists would not shy away from violence:
"No other dialectic is admissible save the dialectic of fists and pistols when justice or the Patria is offended."
The Falange attracted several thousand members in its first few months, most of them admittedly drawn to the movement by the name of Primo de Rivera. Still, its membership was several times that of Spain's other fascist groupuscules, and the '
catastrophist' monarchist conspirators determined to overthrow the Republic began to fund the Falange in preference to the overtly
syndicalist JONS, led by
Ramiro Ledesma de Ramos.
In February 1934, the two groups unified under the unwieldy name of
Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, abbreviated, no more conveniently, to
FE de las JONS. José Antonio hoped that the influx of Ledesma's supporters might contain the Falange's alarming tendency to vanilla conservatism, and the avowed radical Ledesma, for his part, found common ground with José Antonio's sidekick Ruiz de Alda, who made no secret of his
totalitarian sympathies. The slogans which would come to characterise the Falange were imported by Ledesma, not coined by José Antonio.
Street-Fighting Man
During the spring of 1934, several Falange newspaper vendors had been killed by socialist extremists, and José Antonio enlisted
Juan Antonio Ansaldo, a monarchist associate of Ruiz de Alda's, to organise reprisal squads. A notorious drive-by shooting in June 1934, ostensibly a revenge attack after socialists shot dead a picnicking eighteen-year-old Falangist earlier that day, set off a summer of tit-for-tat violence.
Ansaldo's stint with the Falange, though, lasted only a few months, as his ambition to turn the movement into the street-fighting offshoot of the monarchist organisation
Renovación Española became apparent. He confessed to a plot to assassinate the leader in his own office, and was expelled in the Falange's very own
Night of the Long Knives, although he left his hit squads behind. Ruiz de Alma fumed somewhat, but José Antonio became idolised by the students who formed a large part in his movement, and in October 1934 he was - narrowly - named the Falange's
jefe nacional.
José Antonio's relations with other rightist leaders were uneasy, and he was adamant that the monarchists' rising star
José Calvo Sotelo should not be allowed to pull on a blue shirt. The Falange was excluded from Calvo Sotelo's
Bloque Nacional, which hoped to co-ordinate the forces of the right and introduce a corporatist state like Mussolini's, and Renovación Española withdrew its funds. Falange morale ran low, and José Antonio expelled Ledesma in January 1935 before he could cause a damaging split.
When it came to the crunch, however, the Falange's sympathies lay with the right rather than the socialists, anarchists and
Catalan nationalists who rebelled in October 1934 for fear that Spain was about to experience a fascist takeover, and Falangists joined in the repression of the uprising in the miners' heartland of
Asturias. José Antonio would have liked to participate in the so-called
National Front which contested the February
1936 elections, but fell out with
José María Gil Robles, the leader of the supposedly legalist
CEDA, on how many spaces on the candidates' list should be reserved for the Falange.
No Falangist, José Antonio included, won a Cortes seat in February, and the election was closely won by the
Popular Front, essentially a revival of the old Republican-Socialist coalition. Although discouraging in the short term, Azaña's victory discredited the legalist tactic, and tens of thousands of CEDA members switched allegiance to the Falange during the spring when clashes between Marxist and Falangist
militias appeared to give credence to Gil Robles' warnings in the Cortes that
civil war was imminent.
El Ausente
In an attempt to halt the street violence, the Falange was banned on 14 March 1936 and its leadership incarcerated in the
Modelo prison, the Republic's showpiece jail. The inmates' comparative freedom allowed José Antonio to correspond with restive officers preparing a military coup, and send out orders through his brother for Falangists to group themselves into three-man cells. He was moved to
Alicante in June, for fear that he would launch an escape bid.
In the past, José Antonio had been wary of the military route to power, perhaps over-cautious of repeating
his father's mistakes, and certainly conscious that the generals would introduce a traditionalist and authoritarian régime rather than the Falange's syndicalism. Now that the conspiracy had coalesced, though, he recognised that the Falange would be overtaken altogether if it stood aside, and offered his services to the co-ordinating general
Emiliano Mola while insisting that participating Falange units would retain a separate identity.
After the assassination of Calvo Sotelo in July 1936, itself a socialist reprisal for the murder of a left-wing policeman, Mola ordered the revolt to begin, but had to prepare for a protracted conflict when it failed in - as it happened - the areas of Spain which had voted for the Popular Front. José Antonio was not represented in the
Junta de Burgos, the Nationalist zone's embryonic government.
The Falange still became the militia of choice for many among the middle classes who wanted to join the Nationalist war effort but were reluctant to join the
Requetés of the ultra-clerical
Carlists. A number of Republican sympathisers who found themselves in Nationalist territory also joined the Falange to cover themselves, and the newcomers, disparagingly referred to as the
camisas nuevas or 'new shirts', threatened to dilute the Falange's radicalism.
This was more of a difficulty for the Falange's caretaker leader
Manuel Hedilla than for José Antonio, still stuck in prison in Alicante after the rebellion had failed there. Several plans, including a
commando raid, were made to secure his release, but before any of them could materialise, the
Communist mayor of Alicante, acting on his own initiative, had already put him on trial and condemned him to death for helping to orchestrate the revolt.
By the time the Republican cabinet had found out and were discussing whether or not to commute his sentence, José Antonio had already been executed, one of thousands of political killings in the Republican zone. The so-called
Red Terror claimed many less illustrious victims, but is unlikely to have exceeded the level of repression in the Nationalist zone.
Nearly a year after José Antonio's death, the Falange's old guard still refused to believe that he was not alive, and referred to him as
El Ausente, the Absent One. The
Elvis Presley of Nationalist Spain became one of
Franco's favourite symbols of his war, used to point out the supposed barbarity of the decadent Communist foe.
Franco had consolidated the Falange as the basis of his
one-party state in
1937, and introduced an official cult of José Antonio in November 1938, the second anniversary of his death. At the end of the war, Franco's celebrations of victory included a
torchlight procession of Falangists to remove
El Ausente's bones from Alicante to the
pantheon in
El Escorial, the burial place of
Spanish kings.
Read more:
Sheelagh M Ellwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era
Stanley G Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism
Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War