Ernesto Giménez Caballero: national unity and mass politics in the works of a fascist intellectual.

Abstract

By drawing on the works of Giménez Caballero, the first Spanish intellectual to declare his sympathy for fascism, this article endeavours to demonstrate that what attracted him to the Italian regime was its model of mass mobilization. By transferring the model to Spain, Giménez Caballero hoped that it would create as a wedge between the progressive social sectors, the workers and the republicans, who had become increasingly mobilized, and thereby defeat them with their own weapons. He was also attracted by fascist exaltation of empire as a means of strengthening Spanish national unity, which he considered problematic. On the other hand, these two goals were not very different from those aspired to by the two main leaders of the early Spanish fascist movement, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and José Antonio Primo de Rivera.