The "Art Dictatorial State"
He may have killed hundreds of thousands, but apparently the generalissimo had a "softer side." Generalissimo Francisco Franco, leader of the victorious right-wing faction, was the undisputed ruler of Spain from the close of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 until his death in 1975. In the nine years from 1936 to 1945, he presided over the executions of between 150,000 and 400,000 Spaniards. 7 A 2011 article in the Telegraph describing the "softer side" of this mass executioner reveals that he was an accomplished amateur painter in his less sanguinary hours. He enjoyed painting hunting and maritime scenes. He loved to paint nature, and he seemed to identify with beasts and birds of prey. One critic compared his tastes and thematic choices to those of another twentieth-century artist, Adolf Hitler. They were not alone. Benito Mussolini was a novelist and translator of poetry who cast himself as a patron of the arts. Mao Tse Tung fancied himself a poet and master calligrapher. Joseph Stalin was a published poet and something of an art collector with a penchant for male nudes. 8
The shared artistic leanings of dictators are no coincidence. Graphic-design writer Steven Heller characterizes the Nazi propaganda machine, with its intricate lexicon of logos and symbols, as a vast "sociopolitical art project." The Spanish brand of Fascism, known as Falangism, employed a rich visual vocabulary of icons culled from Spain's triumphant Catholic medieval past, just as Italian Fascism used imagery of Rome's imperial heyday. Franco's regime can be seen as a local variation of what Heller calls the "art dictatorial state." 9 The authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century harnessed the power of art and image to infiltrate the consciousness of their constituencies and create conformist consensus. The twentieth century marks a new era of political power, driven by regimes that mastered the techniques of branding and mass marketing decades before Madison Avenue caught on. 10 Public symbols and pageantry have been crucial means of projecting power for centuries. The new media and technologies created by the industrial age, from high-speed printing to reinforced concrete, allowed regimes to fully saturate the visual environment as a means of enforcing social control.
Franco's Spain
In 1936, General Francisco Franco led a military uprising against the elected government of the Second Spanish Republic. Since the end of monarchy in 1931, the Republic had allowed Marxist and Anarchist movements to come to political prominence. The Republic challenged traditional Spanish values. It allowed divorce and promoted women's equality. Many people turned against the Republic when women received the right to vote. 11 The Republic further enraged Catholics when it restricted public displays of religion and threatened to close all Catholic schools. The Republic confiscated Church property and banned the Society of Jesus. 12 A coalition of conservative elements with the support of the Church aimed to restore the old order and reorganize Spain along the lines of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy. The conservative Nationalists hoped for a speedy coup. The war lasted three years. The level of political violence against noncombatants was comparable to that in other civil wars in Europe during that century. 13 It was a bloodbath.
The peace may have been worse than the war. Even before the war, General Franco and his forces—a mix of Spanish Foreign Legion troops and Moroccan mercenaries—had established a reputation for massacre, rape, and torture in the suppression of labor strikes on behalf of the Second Republic. The end of the fighting in 1939 brought Franco's program of limpieza, "cleaning", the eradication of all opposition. Executions of imprisoned Communists continued at least into the 1960s. 14
Franco supported Hitler and sent Spanish troops to fight for Germany against the Soviet Union in World War II. By 1945, Spain was a leper state: internationally isolated, economically ruined, and caught in a frenzy of state terror.
El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen), 1940-1959
El Valle de los Caídos is breathtaking if you don't know enough about art and history to know that it's horrible. It is imposing. On the approach to the monument to Spain's civil war dead, you see it for miles on the way from nearby Madrid. A stone cross stands five hundred feet tall on top of a mountain. Four titanic stone sculptures at its base represent the four Evangelists.
In front of the mountain, a massive semicircular entryway evokes the Heiligenberg Thingstätte Nazi amphitheater (1935) in its shape. 15 The neoclassical colonnade, begun in 1940, invokes those of Albert Speer. The colonnade invites the visitor inside the hollowed-out mountain to a vast domed basilica. The nave of the church is decorated with tapestries featuring scenes from the book of Revelation. The dome is covered in a glittering neo-Byzantine mosaic that refers back to Franco's ancestral Andalucía, once part of the Byzantine Empire. Franco's simple tomb is there in the floor—a stone slab, little more—along with tens of thousands of war dead interred in the walls. The steroidal, overblown scale of the structure suggests a place where giants or monsters would go to attend mass.
The construction took nearly two decades. Many political prisoners worked on the project in exchange for reduced sentences. When Franco dedicated the memorial site in 1959, he declared it a symbol of reconciliation and a memorial for all the war dead, Nationalist and Republican. 16 Franco was still executing Republican prisoners in 1963, making the Valley of the Fallen perhaps the first war memorial ever dedicated to soldiers who were still in the process of being killed. 17
Spain in 1964
Spain in the Franco era is seldom studied at the high-school or even at the undergraduate level. The Spanish Civil War is considered a much more picturesque and enticing era. The truth is that the Franco era is the backdrop for much of the twentieth-century Spanish literature that intermediate and advanced students will read, from the work of Miguel Delibes to that of Ana María Matute. The era also created the conditions that gave way to contemporary Spain. It is simply impossible to understand present-day Spanish society without some knowledge of Franco.
This particular era, the 1960s, is especially illustrative. Studying this era will challenge many of students' received ideas about twentieth-century history since World War II. We are taught in school that the Allies fought a good war and hanged the bad Nazis at Nuremberg. We didn't hang them all, though – not the ones in Madrid. During the war Franco sent tens of thousands of soldiers to fight in Hitler's División Azul, the Blue Division, a Spanish army within the Wehrmacht. Spanish officers who fought for Hitler, some up to the very end of the war, filled key roles in Franco's administration. 18 In the 1960s, Western democracies welcomed Spain back into the fold of civilized nations because they needed Spain's air bases to extend their strategic reach against the Russians. Members of the regime they shook hands with still wore Nazi regalia on their uniforms. 19 It's an opportunity not to be missed for an object lesson in realpolitik, a lesson still timely today when rhetoric about "rogue states" or "regime change" is thrown about in the news media.
Political repression continued in 1960s Spain, despite the thaw in Spain's post-Second World War political isolation. During a miner's strike in Asturias on July 19, 1963, police beat and tortured striking miners. Police castrated one coal miner and shaved the heads of the wives of the miners on strike. 20 The following year Francisco Franco celebrated twenty-five years of peace in Spain, such as it was.
Spain by 1964 was still denied entry into the Common Market, ancestor of the European Union. 21 Still, Spain's per capita GDP increased by 70% from 1960 to 1964 and nearly tripled between 1960 and 1970. 22 From 1950 to 1975, Japan was the only country on earth to experience greater economic development than Spain. 23 Its dictator was ailing; he had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. 24 The regime wrestled with liberalization, albeit on an extremely limited scale, in order to answer external and internal critics. 25
The truth is that Spain's economy grew because the whole world's economy was growing. Spain's economic miracle could have happened much sooner had Franco's regime not stood in the way. Economic development staggered ahead despite the corruption of Spain's crony capitalism and the ineptitude of its government economists. The prosperous Spaniards of the 1970s – the first Spaniards in history not to know widespread hunger – arrived at their happy state almost entirely by accident. 26
Whether because of or in spite of govern, with the rising economy on its side, the regime mounted a massive campaign to demonstrate to Spaniards how much better off they were than they had been under Republican rule. Franco plastered the country with bright, cheery posters proclaiming "PAZ" (peace) with hippie-inspired graphics, complete with white doves. Similarly styled infographics detailed Spain's economic and social advances under Franco since 1935: increases in iron ingots cast, reductions in infant mortality. 27
Twenty-five Years of Peace, 1939-1964: The Franco Peace Medal
A quarter century of Spanish peace and progress called for a medal. Domestically, Franco underscored the point that Spain enjoyed peace and progress while the Western democracies were engaged in a savage series of wars in Asia. Posters were an indispensable tool of the "art dictatorial state." They were cheap and powerful mass media. Goebbels loved them. 28 Posters are effective persuaders, but they are impersonal and impermanent by nature. In addition to being relatively indestructible, Franco's medal reached out personally to aging veterans, the hardest core of Franco's core constituency. A medal, too, creates a bond not only with the honoree, but with the honoree's children and grandchildren.
The Medal for Twenty-five Years of Peace, 1939-1964, was issued to Nationalist veterans of the war or to their surviving families. I do not know the number issued, but given the vast peak numbers of the Nationalist forces during the Civil War, huge numbers must have been given out. The medal hangs from a white, yellow, red, and black ribbon, the colors of the old monarchy. The medal itself is a red Maltese cross topped by a Spanish M26 helmet. The cross bears a white medallion in the center. The medallion reads:
- Z
- 964
("Peace/1939-1964"). Around the medallion is inscribed, "EN LA GUERRA TU SANGRE/EN LA PAZ TU TRABAJO" ("In war your blood/In peace your labor"). On the reverse of the medal the Maltese cross is blue. The inscription in the medallion on the back reads, "HONOR Y GLORIA A CAÍDOS Y HÉROES" ("honor and glory to the fallen and to heroes").
En la guerra tu sangre: The Power and Politics of Grammar
In Italy, Mussolini's Fascist government pursued political aims through linguistic means. It emphasized the populist, anti-capitalist, and egalitarian roots of the movement by legally abolishing the formal mode of address—lei and loro—in favor of the informal tu and its plural voi. 29 Similarly, even though Franco's Fascist-oriented supporters in Spain represented conservative elements, including wealthy landowners, they promoted their populist appeal by using exclusively tú instead of usted and addressing people by their nicknames.
Tú is the familiar form of address. Familiar in this sense does not mean simply people known to us; familiar refers to family. When Franco says on the medal "IN WAR YOUR BLOOD/IN PEACE YOUR LABOR," he uses the familiar tú form of address. He implies a close personal relationship between himself and the veteran; he speaks like a father, a brother, a friend. Grammar communicates power. Here, Franco uses an informal register to establish authority, the influence that comes from a close personal connection.
Franco's Spain and the "Art Dictatorial State"
In terms of the "art dictatorial state," Heller considers Franco a "mere…imitator with [his] own national dialect." 30 For Heller, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao are the true originators of modern totalitarian branding. I'm not so sure. Franco ruled until he died a natural death. His party survived the transition to democracy and is now the ruling party in Spain. Like Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Marxist-leaning party that ruled Mexico for seventy-one years, Franco created a brand of authoritarianism that cultivated lasting brand loyalty in its own local market.
Mexico and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional
The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) was a gruesome debacle with multivalent hostilities between shifting factions. Factional strife continued for some time after the end of overt hostilities. The Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) consolidated power in 1929. Ostensibly Marxist and a member of the Fifth Socialist International, the party, which changed its name to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party), maintained power continuously until 1982. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, commonly known as PRI, is at this writing the current ruling party in Mexico.
Unlike the other "art dictatorial states," Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party never tied its brand to the image of a single charismatic persona the way Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, and Franco's Spain did. Nonetheless, modern Mexican national consciousness would be almost unimaginable without Mexico's uniquely Mesoamerican brand of Socialist Realist aesthetics. The post-revolution Mexican aesthetic, simultaneously evoking East Berlin and the glorious ruins of Mexico's indigenous empires, pervades public space and public life from the office buildings where people work to the money in their wallets.
Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco
Mexico, like Spain, underwent a period of dramatic growth from the 1940s to the economic crash of 1976. In advance of the 1968 Olympics—the first Olympics awarded to a developing nation—the PRI undertook a massive building program to showcase Mexican progress for the world.
The Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was a city within a city—a nearly self-sufficient settlement bordering the Plaza del Meztizaje, site of the last battle between the Aztec empire and the coalition of neighboring states and tribes led by the Spanish in 1521. The historic site contains the ruins of the old Texcoco Templo Mayor complex and a sixteenth-century Spanish church built of stone expropriated from the Aztec temple. The plaza would become the Plaza of the Three Cultures, representing three stages of Mexico's development: Aztec Mexico, Spanish Mexico, and gleaming modern post-Revolutionary Mexico in the shape of an innovative housing and office complex.
Architect Mario Pani's high-rise units evoke depersonalizing Soviet housing blocks as much as they do the clean lines of the Bauhaus-influenced International Style. Indeed, some draw a connection between the International Style itself and the totalitarian aspirations of regimes that promote it. 31 The Mexican-born, European-trained Pani was a committed humanist in design principles, though. He was deeply concerned about creating livable urban space, with adequate provision for pedestrians. The height of housing towers was used to free up land on the ground for green space and open recreational space. Pani was also a conservationist, making provision for water recycling. 32
The problem was the location. The last battle for the Aztec empire was a naval battle; the whole area was once a vast lake. Mario Pani's plans built skyscrapers on a base of lake bed silt—silt that shakes like gelatin when rocked by the fault lines that crisscross underneath it. The 1985 earthquake collapsed some buildings at great loss of life and rendered many others unlivable. Despite renovations, the area is manifestly unsafe for habitation. Mexico's city of the future is now a slum filled largely with squatters.
Text, Image and Landscape
Students should be able to appreciate the interplay between a text, a visual icon, and the geographic setting of both in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The plaque in front reads:
EL 13 DE AGOSTO DE 1521
HEROICAMENTE DEFINDIDO POR CUAUHTEMOC
CAYO TLATELOLCO EN PODER DE HERNAN CORTES
NO FUE TRIUNFO NI DERROTA
FUE EL DOLOROSO NACIMIENTO DEL PUEBLOS MEZTIZO
QUE ES EL MEXICO DE HOY
("On the 13 th of August 1521/Heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc/Tlatelolco fell in the power of Hernán Cortés/It was neither triumph nor defeat/It was the painful birth of the mixed people/That is Mexico of today.")
In the foreground surrounding the simple marker are the Aztec ruins. In the background, we see the crisp geometry of a Mario Pani housing high rise, representing Mexico of today. A housing project can indeed be a national monument—even if it has become today a painfully ironic and dilapidated one. Not far away, another plaque stands to commemorate fallen student activists and their supports. The Plaza was the site of another slaughter in 1968, the massacre of student demonstrators by the military.
The One-Hundred-Peso Note
When I was in Peru examining one of the many statues erected to Spanish conquistadores, a nun told me, "You need to go to Mexico. All over Latin America we put up statues to the conquistadores—but the Mexicans, they build statues to the Indians. They know who they are."
The figures of the Native American and the mestizo are part of Mexico's national iconography. Indigenous rulers are featured in public art the way the Founding Fathers of the United States appear on currency—as if to claim a continuity of regime between Aztec times and today. (The ancestors of today's Mexicans slaughtered and probably ate most of the Aztecs enshrined by modern Mexican state iconography. The Aztecs were predatory colonialist invaders from the north; their neighbors couldn't get rid of them soon enough once they hired Spanish mercenaries to help them.)
The Mexican hundred-peso note features Nezahualcóyotl ("Fasting Coyote"), the great poet king of the fifteenth century. He was not Aztec; he was king of Texcoco, then an independent city state. In addition to being featured on the hundred-peso note and being remembered as a poet, he also has a vast Mexico City slum named after him. The note features Fasting Coyote, looking very much like a Native Americanized Lenin, along with one of his poems, translated to Spanish from Nahuatl:
Amo el canto del zentzontle,
pájaro de cuatrocientas voces,
amo el color del jade
y el enervante perfume de las flores,
pero amo más a mi hermano el hombre.
I love the song of the mockingbird,
Bird of four hundred voices.
I love the color of jade
And the intoxicating perfume of flowers,
But more I love my brother, man.
The poem (whether it was written by Nezahualcóyotl or not) is a good one. The king had a sensitive side; he is said to have erected a temple to the invisible, unknowable God who permeates and penetrates all. No images were allowed, nor blood sacrifices, not even of animals. In his other temples, however, Nezahualcóyotl practiced the same religion as his Aztec neighbors, complete with human sacrifice and cannibalism.
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