Foard’s study (with an introduction by Stanley G. Payne) is a book about the intellectual prehistory of Spanish fascism, the cultural origins of a movement that became important because it was taken over by the military victors in the Spanish Civil War—although Spanish fascism never enjoyed power in its own right. The volume focuses on the singular career of Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899-1988), editor of Madrid’s Gaceta Literaria, a literary journal that was the “vanguard’s” instrument. Focusing on the years between 1918 and 1936, the book seeks to link developments in the arts to the emergence of fascism in Spain. It illustrates how fascist ideas were first disseminated by the new modernists; Giménez Caballero was an avantgardist, and as such the first major proponent of fascist doctrine in Spain, an isolated but significant figure.
Foard regards Giménez Caballero’s visit to Rome in 1928 as seminal to both his artistic and his political careers. There he became fascinated with Latin and converted to fascism. Giménez Caballero esteemed the futurist Filippo Marinetti as an artist and as the intellectual godfather of Italian fascism; from then on he admired Mussolini and Italian fascism (and declared it in the Gaceta). His thoughts on fascism went through three phases: in 1928 he admired fascism but “would not dare” advocate its extension to any European nation other than Italy; in 1929 he advocated pan-Latin fascism; and in 1932-36 he supported a fascist Europe. In the 1930s, politics completely overshadowed art in his published works.
From the early 1920s, Giménez Caballero rejected “Europeanization” as a desirable course for Spain; he looked for some extranational political entity to which to link Spain’s future (union of Iberian peoples; pan-Latin “Counter-Reformation” against the North; reconstitution of Spain’s Hapsburg empire). In Genio de España, he identified fascism with Catholic Christianity and baptized it “the new catholicity.” By 1939 he believed that fascism would be Europe’s salvation, but because of ideological differences he was eventually obliged to withdraw his support from the Falange.
Foard’s study does not concentrate exclusively on the Spanish case; it also illuminates those themes that theoretical fascism was able to borrow from the aesthetic critique of industrial society. The book is solidly grounded in Giménez Caballero’s publications and secondary sources; although not all the insights are new, it aids in understanding the Spanish crisis of the 1930s.
