Army and Party. The Military in the Ministry of the Interior in the Early Franco Regime, 1936-1951

Authors

  • Martí Marín Corbera Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v10i20.757

Keywords:

Francoism, Falange, Interior Governance, Military, Political staff

Abstract

This article is meant as a means to analyze the role of the military in the Ministry of the Interior during the first Francoism, based on the list of civil governors and senior officials -ministers, undersecretaries and general managers- as well as their operating organization chart. The analysis relies on the biographies of the individuals who occupied these positions, resorting to the contemporary press (ABC and La Vanguardia Española, mainly), bibliography (both academic and memorialist) and legislative repertoires (Boletín Oficial del Estado and bulletins of the military ministries), with regard to their respective roles in the decision-making system. The results shows how, in a progressive way, the old Falange (FE-JONS) militants were introduced in a sufficiently significant way in the Ministry in order to control their organizational chart and marginalize any other existing political backgrounds from before the war years (monarchists, traditionalists, Cedists, etc.). This would explain the ease with which the positions of civil governor and provincial head of FET-JONS were unified without any law in that respect. The process was, at first, piloted by Ramón Serrano Suñer (1937-41) as Minister of the Interior, and later by José Luis Arrese Magra from the General Secretariat of the Movement (1942-45), only to return to the Minister of the Interior at the hands of Blas Pérez González (1945-51). This circumstance also shows how many of these Falangists were, in turn, members of the military, without any contradiction between their professional origin and their political militancy. Over time, the new Falange (FET-JONS) militants, most of them with no previous political militancy, completed the list of high-level Ministry charges until the establishment of an actual identification between the Falange party and the Francoist State, at which time the military participation waned in favour of other professional profiles, especially judges, public prosecutors and state attorneys.

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Published

2021-07-01

How to Cite

Army and Party. The Military in the Ministry of the Interior in the Early Franco Regime, 1936-1951. (2021). Revista Universitaria De Historia Militar, 10(20), 224-251. https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v10i20.757

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