Unlike the Spanish left – and, for that matter, much of the right – the Carlists were extremely selective in their use of the term ‘fascism’. Where the left employed it as a catch-all embracing any expression of militant opposition to itself, and rightists such as Calvo Sotelo, Goicoechea and the JAP's spokesmen casually accepted it as applying to themselves, the Carlists consistently refused to don the label. They believed that fascism was an essentially non-Spanish phenomenon, relevant only in countries where no organized, indigenous Traditionalism existed. In Spain, which was blessed with Carlism, it was simply unnecessary. Within the broad and varied spectrum of rightwing politics, fascism was distinguished from all forms of Catholic corporativism by its secularism and above all its ‘Hegelian’ worship of the all-powerful state, a notion which the Carlists rejected as a kind of socialist deviation. In both the Spanish and the general European contexts, individuals and groups were regarded as ‘fascist’ by the Carlists to the extent that they combined étatisme with other, more congenial right-wing attitudes.

The largely uncritical acceptance extended by the Carlists to Salazar, Dollfuss and Degrelle was inevitably somewhat qualified in the case of Mussolini and severely so in that of Hitler, although both naturally came in for praise on account of their anti-communism and their destruction of liberal democracy. Of the two, Mussolini received much less attention but was by far the more sympathetically viewed, his state-worship being amply compensated for by his maintenance of the Italian monarchy and his détente with the Vatican through the Lateran Treaty of 1929.