Postwar

Metaxas, were perhaps not as unpopular as their foreign critics asserted. But they were—rightly—presumed to have the sympathy (and perhaps more) of the United States. What was in essence a belated extension of the Greek civil war of the 1940s rapidly came instead to be seen as the latest cause celebre in Europe’s century-old civil war. ‘Greece’ now replaced ‘Spain’ as the divining rod for polarized political sentiment.

224

Since 1962, Greece had ‘Associate’ status with the European Economic Community.

225

The junta itself, however, did not escape retribution. Eleven of its leaders were tried and convicted in August 1975. Three were given death sentences, later commuted to life in prison. Papadopoulos died in custody in 1999, unrepentant to the end. Brigadier-General Ioannidis was convicted at a later trial for his role in the suppression of the Polytechnic revolt. He remains in prison at the time of writing.

226

Maurras died in 1952, aged 84. Salazar himself, the son of an estate manager, was born in Vimeiro, Portugal, on April 28th 1889, just a week after Hitler. For a man still ruling a European state in the late 1960s he was unusually deeply rooted in the mores of the previous century—his mother was born in 1846.

227

By 1973, Western Europe accounted for two-thirds of Portugal’s imports and exports alike.

228

The puritanical young officers and their left-wing allies were not, however, well-pleased with the subsequent outpouring of what they regarded as pornographic literature and films, as Portugal compensated for fifty years of cultural constriction. They even attempted at one point to ban the playing of fados, the traditional Portuguese folk songs: these, they felt, encouraged ‘bitterness and fatalism’ and were thus inimical to their goals of enlightenment and social progress.

229

As recently as 1963 the Spanish leader had not hesitated to execute a captured Communist, Juan Grimau, in defiance of widespread international criticism.

230

One ironic consequence of the carefully calibrated freedoms that Franco allowed to university activists in his last decade is that Spanish students of the Sixties generation typically exaggerate in retrospect the role they were to play in their country’s subsequent struggle for democracy.

231

See Chapter 7. As a result, Catholic leaders, unsullied by any Francoist past, were able to play an active role in the transition to democracy, serving as a ‘bridge’ between radicals and conservatives.

232

One month before it was declared legal, the PCE hosted in Madrid a public meeting of the Eurocommunist parties of Western Europe.

233

The socio-geographical breakdown of the 1977 vote was uncannily close to that of the elections of 1936— the country’s political culture had in effect been placed in cold storage for four decades.

234

Article 151 of the Constitution offered ‘home rule’ to any region requesting it.

235

There were to be two further plots against king and parliament, in 1982 and 1985, both easily foiled.

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