A Fascism That Came to Stay? On Spanish Falange’s Political Culture

Abstract

Sanz offers a synthetic analysis on the development of the fascist political culture in Spain, as part of the renewed recent Spanish historiography and the integration of the history of that country in its European context. To that end, he explores its cultural roots in the renewed nationalism developed since the turn of the century and its ideological and political construction in the assault on the Second Republic’s democracy. Likewise, it shows the development of the political culture of Falange, fully fascist based on an ultranationalistic, regenerationist, “revolutionary” and “traditional” synthesis, in dialectic with the cultures of the reactionary nationalism and the Catholic right. Finally, it considers the capacity of Spanish fascism to build a mass movement during the Civil War and its fundamental function as a single party of the Francoist dictatorship.