Such is the curious circle drawn by history. ‘Decisionism’ and a love of tyranny according to Schmitt, the demiurge who inspired Franco’s jurists to turn their illegitimate new regime into a ‘creatio a Deo’ (‘Franco, Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God’), were themselves inspired by a nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary’s crazy ideology. Apart from shared ideals, here he finds the one quality that should characterise a Führer, Duce or Caudillo: ‘ferocity of speech’. Although he was a liberal in his youth, Donoso’s attacks on liberalism are expressed with extreme ferocity, which leads him to describe dictatorship as the form of government that corresponds to the divine, natural law.
There is one feature of political liberalism that is the focus of all his contempt and revulsion. Liberalism is. . frivolous. Frivolous! My God! This is a mark left by Donoso on Schmitt, which the latter emphasises early on in his criticism of the liberal system and parliamentary democracies. Frivolity. This is the terrible sin, like relativism in religion, according to Syllabus. In 1934, a hybrid of Donoso and Schmitt, Eugenio Montes, first intellectual figurehead opposed to the Republic and then thurible for Franco’s dictatorship, published his ‘Speech to Spanish Catholicism’, much vaunted by the right, in which he makes it clear there are to be no concessions regarding the form of government: ‘All relativism is anti-Catholic per se. Turning relativity into an ideal norm or code of conduct is like yielding your soul to the devil.’ Why does absolutism direct all its anger towards the scatterbrained idea of frivolity, making it the worst possible insult? Liberal ‘frivolity’ would have politics as a neutral field in an attempt to avoid confrontation. But ‘serious’ politics for the Donosos of yesterday and today is precisely that: confrontation with the enemy. And if there is no enemy, you just have to wait. One will turn up.
‘It is a significant coincidence that a genuine interest in research has always led me to Spain,’ says Don Carlos on 21 March 1962 before Franco’s elites. And of course he talks about the war, ‘In this almost providential coincidence, I see further proof that Spain’s war of national liberation is a touchstone.’ They understand each other. But such recognition was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1952, Arbor, a magazine dependent on the Council for Scientific Research and an important means of expression for Francoist intellectuals, published the essay ‘Carl Schmitt in Compostela’ written by Álvaro D’Ors, a leading member of Opus Dei and a professor in the Faculty of Law in Santiago. Which is where, in 1960, Porto y Cía published a Spanish version of Ex Captivitate Salus, a book that was well received, having been translated by his only daughter, Anima, married to a Professor of the History of Law, Alfonso Otero, whom she met in Germany.
This Spanish edition includes an interesting preface Schmitt wrote in Casalonga, a villa on the outskirts of Santiago, in the summer of 1958. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, there is in this preface not a hint of regret, not a single allusion to the horrors of the war and the policy of racial extermination known as the Holocaust. The only concentration camp he mentions is the one where he was briefly interned after the war, the only lament is his denunciation of the criminalisation of defeated Germany. At the start of the 1960s, on Compostelan evenings, Carl Schmitt, who was always so critical of American democracy, begins to express unusual interest in a politician by the name of Barry Goldwater, a past collaborator of McCarthy in his so-called ‘witch hunt’ and current senator for Arizona. ‘Watch Goldwater,’ Don Carlos tells his Spanish friends. ‘Goldwater represents an ultra-conservatism that wants to conquer the future.’
Let us go back to Madrid and 1 Marina Española Square in 1962. Manuel Fraga Iribarne praises Carl Schmitt’s way of thinking, ‘more relevant today than ever’, and sums it up perfectly, ‘Politics as a decision, the return of personalised power, an anti-formalist understanding of the Constitution, a superseding of the concept of legality. . are scaled heights we cannot turn back from.’ In his speech, the director of the Institute and master of ceremonies, who is himself a jurist, does nothing but defend the Kronjurist.
‘The law can be likened to a long-range cannon,’ wrote Manuel Fraga in the Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia in 1944. Now this jurist with a gunner’s vision, who is about to be named Minister of Information under the dictatorship, pins the decoration to the lapel of his ‘revered master’ Schmitt. Adds with emotion that this is ‘a high point of his career’. After the round of applause, Don Carlos, the man on the sidelines, takes centre stage. He is seventy-three, strong and in good health, and knows that the solemn use of language is going to make him grow in stature in front of a devoted audience. Emphasise the ‘power of presence’ his old friend and colleague Ernst Jünger attributed to him. He seems fully aware of what is happening. The unusual fact that somewhere in the world the Third Reich’s leading jurist is being fêted and awarded.
With pleasure, he finally crosses the line he once drew for himself after the collapse of Nazism, that of taking shelter in the crypt of silence. In Spain, he finds his intellectual refuge and, to a large extent, living and triumphant, his model State. The stage on which to point to the defeat of parliamentary democracy. He is even able to take pleasure, when he meets cultivated reactionaries like D’Ors, in the rhetoric of an imaginary redoubt of the Holy Empire. Like his host, he emits not a word of self-criticism, not a hint of doubt or uncertainty. It is he who supplies his own best eulogy. Unlike his fiery predecessor, who is said sometimes to run out of control in his speeches, he talks slowly, enhances certain words to give way to that ‘power of presence’ described by Jünger. Makes use of liturgical gestures. ‘What was that he said?’ ‘A sacred feast.’ Yes, Carl Schmitt, Don Carlos, proclaims that this reunion with his Spanish friends is ‘a sacred feast in the winter of life’. At that moment, exactly at that moment, according to the testimony of the ecstatic Falangist writer Jesús Fueyo, ‘the lights went out’.
The press highlighted the event. Described the tribute to Carl Schmitt in large letters. Various media reproduced an interview first published in Arriba ‘on account of its great interest’, a euphemism, no doubt, for what was known as ‘obligatory insertion’. ‘It is possible that all European countries will have to justify themselves before Spain,’ said Schmitt. But no medium, no newspaper, reported the blackout. Nobody explained that, when the hierarch was pinning a badge to the chest of Don Carlos, the auditorium in the headquarters of the National Movement went dark. Completely dark.
From A Dramatic History of Culture by Héctor Ríos, unpublished.
The Compulsive Writer
HE FILLED HIS notebooks very quickly. He didn’t just like to write, he had a passion for calligraphy. Which later became a passion for stenography after he learnt the Martí method in Dr Montevideo’s version at Catia’s academy. He noted down his thoughts. Noted down what he was going to say. Both Chelo and the judge, for different reasons, were proud of this premature writer’s vocation. Chelo believed, rightly so, that it originated in those early lessons aimed at exorcising his fear of speech by means of graphic fluency and what she called ‘the hand’s sincerity’. She was pleased and deeply moved by the gifts of observation revealed by Gabriel’s writing, since she still thought of him as a child. The judge Samos had forgotten about the years of despair, that complicated period when Gabriel was so fragile, always on the verge of cracking, like a nativity figure. One day, he’d even used the word ‘defective’ a little carelessly. At a time when Gabriel’s stammer seemed to be getting worse. ‘Defective,’ he muttered, ‘a defective son’. In search of a word that sounded neutral, an ‘extenuating term’, he later claimed, he chose one that, even in a whisper, banged like a tin can.