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Caudillo With a Cause
| Article
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13563 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
1,754 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
FRANCO
J.P. Fusi, translated by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
New York: Harper and Row, 1987
202 pp., $25
Harper and Row has brought out this translation of J.P. Fusi's Franco just before another study of the same controversial figure, by Stanley Payne, is scheduled to appear. Though I have not yet seen Payne's biography, it may be assumed that from his earlier work on Spanish history his book, unlike Fusi's, will be factually detailed and generally dispassionate. Fusi, by contrast, does not present the fruits of arduous research; rather, he conveys his views in a biographical sketch of the leader who ruled Spain as its proclaimed caudillo (leader) between 1939 and 1975. Fusi takes repeated pains to appear unsympathetic toward Franco; Raymond Carr in the preface gives the same impression even more strongly, describing the later Francoist regime as an "authoritarian technocracy that sought to maintain the traditional Catholic values in a Spain of secular consumerism." Carr and Fusi both speak about, without proving, a "totalitarian" aspect in Franco's government. They also agree that its opening to the Left, starting in the 1980s, occurred because of "bad democratic conscience" and the quest for "democratic legitimacy."
Fusi generally ignores the rampant chaos in Spain that erupted in civil war on July 18, 1936. Although he lets us know that the Catholic opposition leader to the leftist government, Jose Calvo Sotelo, was assassinated on July 13 (with the complicity of cabinet members and republican military officers), he fails to mention that civil order had already broken down. Anarchists
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