Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera

Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera founded the Falange, was shot at thirty-three, and was more useful to Franco dead than he had been alive. He was the eldest son of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, trained as a lawyer, and entered politics in 1931 largely to defend his father's memory after the Republic came in. In 1933 he founded Falange Espanola, a small movement of students and street fighters offering a Spanish version of the fascism then succeeding elsewhere: national syndicalism, the abolition of party politics, a corporate state, and an aesthetic of violence and sacrifice expressed in some genuinely good prose - he was a considerably better writer than orator, and knew it. The party polled negligibly, won no seats worth the name in 1936, and mattered chiefly as a supplier of gunmen in the street war of that spring. He was arrested in March 1936 on a weapons charge, was still in prison at Alicante when the generals rose in July, was tried for conspiracy and shot on 20 November. Franco, who had no particular use for him living and could not easily have shared power with a charismatic founder, made him the martyr of the movement instead: his name was painted on church walls across Spain as el Ausente, the absent one, his remains were carried to the Escorial and later to the Valley of the Fallen, and the Falange he left was merged into a single state party he had no say in designing. His writings were edited posthumously into a canon and taught in Spanish schools for decades. The Falange's blue shirts and yoke-and-arrows emblem outlived him as state symbols. He had opposed his father's dictatorship being called a dictatorship. Spain's 2007 Law of Historical Memory led eventually to the removal of his name from public buildings, and his remains were moved out of the Valley of the Fallen in 2023.

• Lived: 1903 CE – 1936 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: politician