Volume 35, Number 1 · February 4, 1988
How Franco Made It
By Raymond Carr
The Franco Regime: 1936–1975
by Stanley G. Payne
University of Wisconsin Press, 677 pp., $30.00
Professor Payne is a man of few illusions. He has a profound contempt for utopian politics and a marked distrust, if not distaste, for the left in general. He would seem to regard Franco's dictatorship as a deserved punishment for the follies and failures of democracy in the Second Republic of 1931. He argues that the sudden eruption of mass politics polarized Spanish society and that by 1936 the government of the Popular Front, elected by a narrow majority in February 1936, was in the process of becoming a prisoner of the revolutionary left. This completed the contrary process by which the right became counterrevolutionary. When Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the counterrevolutionary right, was assassinated by government agents on the night of July 12–13 there was, Payne argues, little alternative for the right but to take up arms against what was rapidly on the way to becoming a totalitarian regime of the left. The last attempt to satisfy the outraged right and to turn it from violence—Premier Martinez Barrio's offer on the telephone to General Mola, organizer of the military conspiracy, of a national government—came too late. The center, that utopia of moderates like Professor Payne, had dropped out of political life; only the extremes of right and left remained and they had no alternative but to fight it out to the finish.
Review, 4721 words
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