Franco’s formative years in Spanish Morocco

Ceuta, suddenly in the spotlight of European news, is a narrow strip of rock where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, an exclave separated from the Spanish mainland by the Strait of Gibraltar. Across this stretch of water, Spain has looked towards Africa for five centuries. It is there that the whole arc of Spain’s African century – its rise, its reverie, and its ruin – may still be traced. For the first half of the 20th century, Morocco held a place in the Spanish imagination at once exalted and calamitous: it was both the ultimum refugium of a vanishing imperial dream and the springboard from which the Nationalist revolt was launched in the summer of 1936.

Historians identify the emergence of ‘Two Spains’ during the 19th century: one supposedly progressive, wedded to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; the other, staunchly Catholic, looking back to its medieval glories, and to imperial dominion in the Americas. If ever those two countries stepped out of the historians’ books and into life, it was after El Desastre of 1898. The loss of the Philippines and of Cuba to the United States bred an acute sense of imperial decline, and with it a collapse of national self-esteem. ‘Spain without Cuba’, ran one newspaper’s verdict, ‘would enter a period of rapid and inevitable decadence.’ The wound was sharpened by the emergence of a sense of national sovereignty: where the loss of Argentina and Mexico a century before might be laid at the door of the corrupt and grotesquely incompetent Ferdinand VII, this was no longer the forfeiture of a monarch’s inheritance but of the nation’s own, taking the form of a communal bereavement, personal and keenly felt.

Spanish elites did not, for all that, relinquish their imperial dreams – after all, this was the age of Empire. In an attempt to redeem the military pride squandered in 1898, Spain joined the European carve-up of north-west Africa, its troops now pitted against the Riffian tribesmen in the mountains of northern Morocco in a prolonged conflict that came to be known as the Rif Campaigns. In 1904, Britain, wanting to check French ambition in the region, invited Spain into the concert of powers watching over Morocco’s sultan, Abd al-Aziz. Africa thus became a psychological and military compensation for the empire lost in the west, and a token that Spain was at last admitted to the company of the great European powers. No one was more stirred by the venture than a young cadet, freshly commissioned from the military academy at Toledo, named Francisco Franco: it was in Africa that the future dictator would forge both his military and his political character.

When the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco came into being, it added but five per cent of the country to the older strongholds of Melilla and Ceuta – the latter just 17 miles across the mouth of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar, and Spanish since 1668. Covering 10,800 square miles, with a population of 400,000, the new territory embraced a stretch of the Mediterranean coast and a smaller reach of the Atlantic. Jingoistic sentiment at home hailed the young King Alfonso XIII as ‘Africanus’, after the Roman general Scipio, who had humbled Carthage in the Second Punic War.

In 1912 Franco joined the so-called Africanistas, the corps who regarded themselves as a military elite and glorified death in the service of the patria. It was in that Army of Africa that Franco fashioned his ill-defined vision of the grandeur of Spain, and of his own destiny to salvage it, as he confessed some years later: ‘My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force. There was born the possibility of rescuing a great Spain. Without Africa, I can scarcely explain myself to myself.’

Franco became a key player in the later incarnation of the Africanistas, the Spanish Legion, founded in 1920, which drew its credo from the martial code of the Japanese samurai, lauding the ideals of duty, honour and sacrifice; like its French counterpart, it also offered a refuge to men fleeing remorse and terrible pasts. These were the interwar years, in which one European republic crumbled after another, giving way to military dictatorship, until only France and Britain were left holding the line of liberal democracy in Western Europe. Spain meanwhile had declared the Second Republic in 1931.

In such a climate it is little wonder that the young officers in Africa fell to blaming the politicians for the ‘backstabbing’ of 1898 (a familiar theme), and to fomenting a myth of the army as the destined redeemer of Spain’s lost greatness. Morocco became the incubator of the coming military conspiracy: alongside Franco one finds General Mola, coiner of the phrase ‘fifth column’ and known as El Director for his part in the plot; the Legion’s founder, José Millán-Astray; and Juan Yagüe, the infamous ‘Butcher of Badajoz’. The army raised to subdue Morocco would one day be unleashed upon Spain.

The opportunity to move against the young republic came in the febrile summer of 1936. On 17 July the Army of Africa garrison at Melilla rose in revolt, and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) – the overture to the Second World War – had begun. Within hours the heavily militarised protectorate was in Nationalist hands, and Franco proclaimed leader of the rising in Africa. From the Protectorate the assault was launched upon the southern cities of Seville, Cádiz and Algeciras, and thence the march northward, towards Madrid. That the Republic never raised the Rif against Franco – never, in George Orwell’s phrase, thought to ‘declare Morocco liberated’ – was among the causes of its defeat.

After the establishment of Franco’s dictatorship in 1939, and until 1955, Morocco remained integral to the mythology of the regime: at once a military springboard, a reservoir of loyal shock troops, and a cornerstone of Spanish imperial prestige. All this ended with some speed. When John Foster Dulles – the US Secretary of State who despised the European empires and did his utmost to dismantle them, including Britain’s, not least during the Suez Crisis of 1956 – came to Madrid, he made plain that Spain’s admission to the United Nations was conditional upon surrendering the protectorate. A year later, Franco duly handed the greater part of it to King Mohammed V, retaining only a small enclave around Sidi Ifni on the Atlantic coast – relinquished in turn in 1969 – and the barren Spanish Sahara.

On 6 November 1975, with Franco lying on his deathbed, King Hassan II sent 350,000 Moroccan volunteers across the frontier into that desert to force the question of its abandonment. He succeeded, and the empire was no more; it died, fittingly, with the man who had done most to summon it back from the 19th century. Empires leave their last traces at the edges. Spain’s are at Ceuta.