Earlier, Franco had been impressed by the idea of Catholic corporatism and in 1935 had carefully noted the updating of Carlist doctrine in Víctor Pradera’s El Estado Nuevo, which called for a new Spanish monarchy, but he concluded that these approaches were too right wing and lacked broad mass appeal. Something more dynamic and up-to-date was needed. By the time Serrano arrived in Salamanca, he found that Franco “already had the idea of reducing the various parties and ideologies of the movement to a common denominator. He showed me the statutes of the Falange on which he had made copious marginal notations. He had also made comparisons between the speeches of [late Falange leader] José Antonio and of Pradera."
Unlike Nicolás, Serrano had a plan of his own, which largely, though never entirely, coincided with Franco’s own ideas, and he proposed to create what can be most simply described as a sort of institutionalized equivalent of Italian fascism, though it would be more identified with Catholicism than fascism, whatever the contradictions such an identification entailed. This would mean building a state political party, based on the Falange. As Serrano later put it, traditionalist, monarchist Carlism “suffered from a certain lack of political modernity. On the other hand, much of its doctrine was included in the thought of the Falange, which furthermore had the popular and revolutionary content that could enable Nationalist Spain to absorb Red Spain ideologically, which was our great ambition and our great duty.”2 It is doubtful that either Franco or Serrano had ever read the early-19th-century theorist Joseph de Maistre, but they implicitly agreed with his conclusion that the counterrevolution was not the opposite of a revolution, but rather was an opposing revolution. The revolutionary dimension of their counterrevolution would be provided by a kind of fascism. [...]
The goal was to develop a partido único of a semifascist kind, though not as the mere imitation of the Italian or any other foreign model. In an interview in a pamphlet titled Ideario del Generalísimo, published soon afterward, Franco declared that “our system will be based on a Portuguese or Italian model, though we shall preserve our historic institutions.” Later, in an interview with the daily Spanish newspaper ABC on July 19, 1937, he reiterated that the objective was to achieve “a totalitarian state,” though the example he evoked was the institutional structure of the Catholic monarchs in the 15th century. As he put it rather ambiguously in an interview with the New York Times Magazine in December 1937, “Spain has its own tradition, and the majority of the modern formulas that are to be discovered in the totalitarian countries may be found already incorporated within our national past.”
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