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Which notably was not Fascist. The Falange were the the Fascists party in Spain and if they'd had their way Spain would have joined the war and been bombed to rubble with the other Fascist powers.
At the time, Spain was referred to as fascist, and Franco a Falangist (which from what I can tell was technically true in the most amusing possible way).
I don't really have a dog in the "what counts as true fascism?" hairsplitting fight. If your point is that Franco was too smart fight a silly, self-destructive war in the name of ideology, I think you're right. But I also think that Franco's Spain would be widely reviled as fascist if it existed today (and it's still often referred to as fascistic).
I'm not saying this out of some pro-fascistic sensibility, by the way, it's just that Italy, Spain, and Germany were all having a moment during the 1930s and people sort of forget about Spain. Sort of how people forget what Vietnam got up to after the Vietnam war.
Franco’s government was a compromise party including basically the entire right wing of Spain and which spent its later years run as a de facto catholic theocracy.
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Sure and that all makes sense and I don't doubt that Francoist Spain would be reviled as Fascist. One of my hobby horses is that Fascist doesn't simply mean "right wing Authoritarian" The Fascist movements in Italy and especially Germany conceived of themselves as revolutionary and I personally do think they represented a true third way. Nazi Germany really represented something new, closer to ancient Assyria or the Khmer Rouge then the stodgy conservative Catholic governments that existed after or that Franco represented. The Nazis considered destroying Catholicism in Germany after the war for example and planned to create their own syncretic new religion.
Though Spain certainly was part of a moment in the 30s as you mention. But I think Spain's coalition of rightwing groups as a opposed to a unitary Fascist state together with Franco created a moderating influence that we wouldn't see in an ascendant Germany and to a lesser extent Italy.
Fascism actually has something of a defined political doctrine. Mussolini even wrote a book about it during his rise to power in Italy. In the early 20th century, elements of it were debated hotly by people sympathetic to its beliefs and there were disagreements, but it isn’t a “catch all” phrase the way it’s used to describe generic, top-down systems, or a every different close integration between the state and economic life. Fascist “corporatism,” isn’t just an agglomeration of public-private partnerships between SOE’s (which every Chinese business is a de facto part of), just because they operate it as a competitive enterprise in the market.
Germany and the Nazis were altogether a more interesting case. They fawned over agricultural life in a lot of ways and disliked what the program of industrialization does to social values and communal living. They had a doctrine they tried promulgating to more or less “phase out” religion that they called “Positive Christianity,” but it never really took with the rest of society. In Franco’s case, it’s a pity his federated system didn’t last, and by the time the rest of the larger theater of WW2 had clearly been decided for the Allies, whatever pockets remained of those ideologies were just going to be a matter of time before they dissolved into nothing. You had people like Leon Degrelle try and keep it alive in Belgium with the Rexist Party, but they weren’t going to overcome the historical trend moving against them by that point.
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