The Spanish Directory and the Constitution

It is one of the surprising things in contemporary political science that at a time when what is known as “the pragmatic revolt in politics” is an outstanding phenomenon, and when lavish attention is being bestowed upon the histrionic adventures of Italy into the fields of political realism, the experiments of the Spanish Directory tend to be passed over without serious investigation. Spain has been treated as though her experiment were only a futile or less meaningful, slavish imitation of the work of Il Duce, as though the Iberian peninsula were witnessing only in parvo the monumental experiments of Fascism. This easy dismissal of the work of the Directory in Spain may be comforting in its simplicity, but it is a distinct over-simplification and an attempt to argue from analogy where the basic and essential elements of a similar situation are lacking. Merely the fact of dictatorship, merely the supposed association of an armed partisan force with the dictator in power, merely the fact of the abrogation of public liberties in each instance have been taken to constitute the essential elements of comparison and identification. The less dramatic character of the events in Spain has tended to obscure the far-reaching differences between the régimes centering in Rome and Madrid.