Franco and Spanish Protestants: institutional repression, not personal hatred

Franco did not hate Protestants: repression did not need it either

Franco did not hate Protestants. Hatred is a passionate luxury, and Francoism allowed itself no luxuries when it could use the institutional machinery. Closed churches, fines, social hostility and the occasional informant inside evangelical communities were the everyday tools of a regime that saw religious uniformity as the pillar of its crusade narrative. Protestantism, foreign and dissident, called into question the theological public order.

The Inquisition does not explain everything

The problem goes back a long way. The Inquisition was the armed wing of the Catholic monopoly, but it only explains part of Protestantism's failure in Spain. Without an urban bourgeoisie or a German prince to fund the Reformation, the ground was not fertile. Casiodoro de Reina, the most famous Spanish Protestant, lived it firsthand: condemned to exile as a heretic, he arrived in Geneva and found that Calvin's city smelled of scorched flesh. He criticized the execution of Servetus and branded Geneva a "new Rome." He ended up in Frankfurt, where he died.

Reforms that devour their children

The story does not end there. Luther called the Anabaptists beasts, and Calvin burned heretics while Reina fled. Every reform ends up founding its own Rome, with fewer flourishes but the same power to excommunicate. The claim that the Catholic Church stayed truest to the Gospels is a narrative not even communion wine can sustain.

What would have peine without the double intolerance of Spain and Geneva? The question remains open, as does the suspicion that Francoist "hatred" was not an emotion, but the most profitable politico-religious business of the twentieth century.