Ernesto Giménez Caballero

Ernesto Giménez Caballero (2 August 1899 – 14 May 1988), also known as Gecé, was a Spanish writer, diplomat, and pioneer of Fascism in Spain. Director and founder of the avant-garde magazine (1927–1932), his work has been categorized as being part of the Futurist and Surrealist movement, while Stanley G. Payne has described him as the Spanish Gabriele d'Annunzio.

Education and military service He took the baccalaureate education at the Instituto San Isidro. Between 1916 and 1920 he took studies in Letras at the Central University (where he wrote for the Conservative journal Filosofía y Letras and helped to launch a "Group of Socialist Students", some of whose members would soon after establish the Spanish Communist Party), and then collaborated for a time at the Centro de Estudios Históricos before moving to the University of Strasbourg to work as lecturer in Spanish. Influenced by José Ortega y Gasset's critique of democracy, however, he became a nationalist in the vein of Miguel de Unamuno.

He performed his military service in Spanish Morocco, although his 1923 book on the experience, Notas Marruecas de un Soldado, caused such outrage amongst the generals that he was imprisoned for a time before being pardoned by General and Dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera.

But in 1928 he went to Italy and struck up friendships with such fascist thinkers as Giuseppe Bottai, Giovanni Gentile, Curzio Malaparte and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, eventually becoming an adherent of fascist beliefs himself.

Having had already made a name for himself as an aesthetic writer, he announced his conversion to fascism in 1928 in an article in , a journal he had founded in 1927. In February 1929 he published "Carta a un compañero de la Joven España", considered the first intellectual manifesto of Spanish fascism.

Ideology Being married to an Italian, sister of the Italian Consul at Strasburg, Giménez Caballero's fascism was largely derived from the Italian model of fascism whilst also including an international dimension in which he saw fascism as the future of the Latin Catholic world. He had little sympathy for National Socialism, which he saw as too Protestant and northern, even going so far as foreseeing war between fascism and national socialism. and became involved in his Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista. However the writer was no political organizer and generally left control of the movement to Ledesma.

After the Spanish Civil War he spent most of his time abroad, holding positions in the Spanish embassies in Paraguay and Brazil before being appointed ambassador to Paraguay in 1958, a position he held for 12 years. In later life he continued as a writer, winning his final writing prize, Premio Espejo de España, for his work Retratos españoles (bastante parecidos) in 1985 whilst also directing a series of documentary films. He claimed later in life, in his 80s to have become a follower of anarcho-syndicalism.

Giménez Caballero, who spent his last months following a surgical procedure to treat cataract in his house in the El Viso colony under an ill condition and dealing with auditive disorders, finally died on 14 May 1988.