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fundamentalist Donoso were the doctrinal trinity on which to build the ‘new order’. The new version of the Holy Empire. Donoso Cortés wrote the only great speech nineteenth-century Spanish fundamentalism managed to export with a degree of success to the rest of Europe. Not surprising. The so-called Speech on Dictatorship, delivered on 4 January 1849 in the Congress of Deputies, must rank as one of the most horrifying interventions ever to have been pronounced in a parliamentary chamber. The conservative majority’s whoops and applause are a vibrant part of the speech. Donoso does not hesitate to define dictatorship as a divine act, an order of Providence. The impact of the speech, whose content was nothing new, the reverberations it caused in conservative Europe, have something to do with its direct, apodictic style and intimidatory ending. It is probably the first Fascist discourse in the modern sense. Already, by the 1920s, it had captivated Schmitt, who was born in 1888 in Plettenberg, Westphalia, in a very conservative Catholic environment. In 1929, the German jurist and professor appeared in Madrid for the first time to deliver a lecture. What does he talk about? He reintroduces the Spanish to Donoso Cortés! Obviously ‘it is a question of choosing between the dictatorship that comes from below and the dictatorship that comes from above. I choose the one that comes from above, because it comes from cleaner, more serene regions. It is a question, finally, of choosing between the dagger and the sabre. I choose the dictatorship of the sabre, because it is nobler.’ (Bravo! Bravo!) An interest in the history of Spain has other useful reference points, such as the expulsion of the Jews under the Catholic Monarchs.

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,