Propaganda in Franco's Time

Abstract

This paper probes the power and endurance of Franco's propaganda from 1939 to the present. It examines the press, the foreign policy in Latin America, and the workings of the Tribunal para la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo. Altogether, a picture emerges of a national campaign that simultaneously persecuted, demonized and, inconsistently, banished the public mention and memory of exiles, at the same time silencing the collective punishment of defeated Republicans. The method employed by the regime to expose its enemy's image had three contradictory aims: first, the dissemination of their evil nature, second, the suppression of information about their fate and whereabouts, and third, a deliberate policy of oblivion and silence. These conflicting messages became a strategy that constantly reminded Spaniards of the Civil War's horrors and the need to contain dissent in order to forestall another conflict. Its endurance and long life are illustrated by the survival capacity of the communist myth, the occultation of state crimes until very recently unreported, and the disregard of the Masons’ persecution well into the late 1960s. In October 1975 Franco reiterated the essence of his propaganda. The paper demonstrates that Franco's propaganda continues to evolve into a contemporary exoneration of the regime.

Notes

¹George Orwell, ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Secker & Warburg, 1985), 241.

² La Vanguardia Española, 16 de junio de 1962.

³Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Franco and the Spanish Civil War (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), xvi.

⁴Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 2004), 316–17.

⁵Payne, The Spanish Civil War, 153.

⁶Herbert R. Southworth, Conspiracy and the Spanish Civil War. The Brainwashing of Francisco Franco (London/New York: Routledge, 2002).

⁷ La Vanguardia Española, 18 de julio de 1953, p. 1.

⁸Carlos Barrera, Periodismo y franquismo (Barcelona: Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, 1995), 76.

⁹Archives of La Vanguardia Española (Barcelona, 1939–1975).

¹⁰It was not until 1978, three years after Franco's death, that La Vanguardia Española changed back to the original La Vanguardia.

¹¹Quoted by Francie Cate-Arries in her Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939–1945 (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2004), 14.

¹²‘Palabras de Franco al pueblo español en la Plaza de Oriente’, La Vanguardia Española, 2 de octubre de 1975, p. 1 cover.

¹³‘Veinte mil exiliados podrán optar por la condición de refugiados’, La Vanguardia, 22 de junio 1979, p. 8. The authors ignored altogether research about the refugees published outside Spain in the 1960s, by David Wingeate Pike, Vae victis! Los republicanos españoles refugiados en Francia, 1939–1944 (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1969).

¹⁴Mireya Folch-Serra, ‘The Geopolitics of Identity: Popular Literature, Censorship and the Spanish Media’, Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, I (2002), 177–92.

¹⁵See El País, 17 March 2001, Babelia 1.

¹⁶Barrera, Periodismo y franquismo, 34.

¹⁷Eloy E. Merino and H. Rosi Song, Traces of Contamination: Unearthing the Francoist Legacy in Contemporary Spanish Discourse (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2005).

¹⁸David K. Herzberger, Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain (Durham, NC./London: Duke U. P., 1995).

¹⁹ Emigración y exilio españoles en Francia, 1936–1946, ed. Benito Bermejo (Madrid: Euderna, 1996).

²⁰Merino and Song, Traces of Contamination, 14.

²¹AGA—México 1938, Caja 59–155 E–Carpeta Prensa y Propaganda (39) 6–7 1940, Madrid: ‘Rogando enviar una memoria sobre actividades de los rojos en el país y número de publicaciones y periódicos que se editan y propaganda radiada’. Also, (48) 7–8 1940 article ‘Al descubierto’ by V. Díaz Martínez, which criticizes the behaviour of Spaniards living in México and a comment on México's newspaper: ‘El Nacional, periódico oficial, rojo, antiespañol’.

²²AGA 51/209039 (1944), Asunto: Argentina Delegación Nacional del Servicio Exterior de FET y JONS. ‘Informe y comentarios acerca del posible establecimiento de refugiados políticos en Argentina’.

²³The National Delegate, Antonio Riestra del Moral, wrote in February 1945 to José Félix de Lequerica, that Alberti's book was an ‘infame […] serie de calumnias vertidas en malos versos’ (Madrid, 17 de febrero, 1945) (AGA 51/20939/doc 10).

²⁴AGA Caja 54/5365, ‘Influencia judaico-demócrata Bolchevique’, Doc II A/a–19, ‘contrarrestar los efectos […] de sus actividades contrarias al régimen’; Director Gral. de Política Exterior al Embajador de España en La Habana (carta reservada) Madrid, 4 de agosto de 1959. Madariaga cited by the ‘encargado de negocios a la Dirección de Política de América, 13 febrero 1947’.

²⁵AGA, Legajo, 1.254.

²⁶Gabrielle Ashford Hodges, Franco. A Concise Biography (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000), 150–51.

²⁷Hodges, Franco, 151.

²⁸Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1965), 512–13.

²⁹Article 12 of the Ley para la Represión del la Masonería y el Comunismo, 1 March 1940 (Boletín Oficial del Estado, 62 [2 de Marzo 1940]) establishes its creation and composition: a president, an Army general, a Falange leader and two lawyers, all of them named by the head of state.

³⁰ Boletín Oficial del Estado (1963).

³¹‘A cada persona se le examina no ya con el debido conocimiento de lo actuado, sino también con tan peculiar atención que siempre queda reconstruida la personalidad del encartado, no tan sólo en su aspecto masónico, sino en el religioso, político, social—antes y después del MOVIMIENTO—familiar, cultural, etc.’ (Memoria que eleva la Secretaria General del Tribunal, n/d [probably 1942], TRMC, legajo 1.257 pp. 2–3).

³² Memoria que eleva la Secretaría General del Tribunal, n/d [probably 1942], TRMC, legajo 1.257, p. 6.

³³ Memoria que eleva la Secretaría General del Tribunal, n/d [probably 1942], TRMC, legajo 1.257, p. 9.

³⁴ Memoria que eleva la Secretaría General del Tribunal, n/d [probably 1942], TRMC, legajo 1.257, p. 9.

³⁵ Memoria que eleva la Secretaría General del Tribunal, n/d [probably 1942], TRMC, legajo 1.257, pp. 2–3.

³⁶ ‘La Vanguardia eleva hoy a Su Excelencia el Generalísimo Franco, supremo artífice de la histórica gesta trascendental, la reiteración de su fidelidad, de su entusiasmo y de su adhesión inconmovible’ (Barcelona, 18 July 1953).

³⁷Southworth, Conspiracy and the Spanish Civil War, 127.

³⁸Pepa Novell, ‘Revisiones del franquismo: olvido presencial y presencia del olvido’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 36:1 (2011), 191–214 (pp. 107–08).

⁴⁰Abdón Mateos y Álvaro Soto, El final del franquismo, 1959–1975. La transformación de la sociedad española (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, Historia 16, 1997), 57–59.

³⁹ Spain Transformed. The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959-75, ed. Nigel Townson (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 24.

⁴¹Pamela Radcliff, ‘Associations and the Social Origins of the Transition during the Late Franco Regime’, in Spain Transformed, ed. Townson, 140–62 (p. 144).

⁴²Radcliff, ‘Associations and the Social Origins of the Transition’, 150.

⁴⁷Vicenç Navarro, El subdesarrollo social de España: causas y consecuencias (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2006), 148.

⁴³Elisa Chulia, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Development of a Pre-Democratic Civil Society in Spain’, in Spain Transformed, ed. Townson, 163–81 (p. 178).

⁴⁴For a documented account of the 1960s persecution of exiles, see Mireya Folch-Serra ‘Tot relacionant la repressio i l'exili: una geografia de la diaspora republicana espanyola, 1939–1975’, in Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia, 61–62 (2006), 17–40.

⁴⁵Edward Malefakis, ‘The Franco Dictatorship: A Bifurcated Regime?’, in Spain Transformed, ed. Townson, 248–54 (p. 251).

⁴⁶Malefakis, ‘The Franco Dictatorship’, 253.

⁴⁸Brian B. Bunk, Ghosts of Passion: Martyrdom, Gender, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2007).