Franco
Page 1
Enrique Moradiellos is Professor of Modern Spanish and European History at the University of Extremadura, Spain. He has previously taught at Queen Mary, University of London and Complutense University, Madrid and is the author of ten books on twentieth-century Spain, published in Spanish. In 2017 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Historia (National Prize for History) by the Ministry of Education of Spain.
‘Enrique Moradiellos is one of the most distinguished historians of twentieth-century Spain. For a concise and lucid account of Franco, the man and his dictatorship, it would be difficult to improve on his balanced and learned account.’
Paul Preston, author of The Last Days of the Spanish Republic
FRANCO
Anatomy of a Dictator
Enrique Moradiellos
Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright © 2018 Enrique Moradiellos
The right of Enrique Moradiellos to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978 1 78453 942 9
eISBN: 978 1 78672 300 0
ePDF: 978 1 78673 300 9
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd
To Susana and Inés
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Map
Introduction: Franco, an Uncomfortable Spectre from the Past
1 The Man: A Basic Biography
2 The Caudillo: A Charismatic Dictator
3 The Regime: A Complex Dictatorship
Notes
Further Reading
Plates
Illustrations
1 Stamps showing Franco in his 40s, 50s and 60s (Public domain)
2 Franco as a commander in the African Army, 1916 (Album / Universal Images Group / Universal History Archive)
3 Franco as Caudillo after the victory of 1939 (Album / Universal Images Group / Universal History Archive / UIG)
4 Franco and Hitler at Hendaye (on the Spanish–French frontier), 23 October 1940 (Album / Oronoz)
5 Franco as Caudillo and head of state, late 1950s (Album / Granger, NYC)
6 Franco and his wife Carmen at a social event in the mid-1960s (Album / Universal Images Group / Universal History Archive / UIG)
7 Franco and Prince Juan Carlos in 1972 (Rue des Archives / Bridgeman Images / AGIP)
8 The front cover of a book of Franco’s speeches, published in 1939 (Public domain)
9 Postcard depicting General Franco with ‘Long Live Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal’ slogans and flags – from the time of the Spanish Civil War (Public domain)
10 Franco on the cover of Time magazine, October 1943 (Public domain)
11 A 1953 coin featuring Franco (Public domain)
12 The cover of a book of caricatures published in Latin America (Uruguay and Argentina) in 1937 (Public domain)
13 The Generalissimo, a poster issued by the Madrid Defence Council (Junta de Defensa de Madrid) in late 1936 (Public domain)
14 Caricature of Franco published in an exiled Republican magazine in 1953, the year in which Franco allowed the US to build military bases in Spain. The caption reads ‘Very well paid!’ (Public domain)
15 Caricature of Franco published in exile in France by a Republican organisation during the 1940s (Public domain)
Map
The division of Spain, August 1936. The shaded areas are those held by the government.
Introduction
FRANCO
An Uncomfortable Spectre from the Past
A little over 40 years ago, on 20 November 1975, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde died of natural causes in Madrid, just as he was about to celebrate his eighty-third birthday. For almost 40 years, from 1 October 1936, he had been the ‘Caudillo’, the head of the dictatorial regime of Spain. This book is an introduction to his personality, his activities as a political ruler and the nature of the institutional regime that he established and led until his death.
In the public memory of Spaniards and of European and international contemporaries, Franco was above all the ‘Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God’. So read the inscription on the back of all Spanish coins minted since December 1946, approved by the unanimous decision of the Plenary of the Cortes (the Spanish Parliament). This was just one of the many honours and official tributes awarded to the soldier who had born in El Ferrol in December 1892, a man who had spent the majority of his military career in the bloody colonial war in Morocco, who later revolted against the government of the Second Republic in July 1936 and won an unconditional victory in the Civil War in April 1939. He had held the titles of head of state, head of government, generalissimo of the armies, homo missus a Deo (the man sent by God) and national chief of the Falange (the one-party state), ‘only responsible to God and history’. He was, in short, the Caudillo, the ‘supreme captain of the race’, the ‘Caesar undefeated’, the ‘saviour of the Fatherland’, ‘guardian of the Spanish Empire’ and ‘sentinel of the West’. He was an absolute dictator with full powers, deeply reactionary, ultra-nationalist and a Catholic fundamentalist who had assumed on 1 October 1936 ‘all the powers of the New State’ and whose authority would be ‘providential and for life’.1 He was not merely a simple ‘dictator’, for reasons articulated with typical hyperbole by the politicized writer and poet born in Cádiz, José María Pemán:
Francisco Franco: the quiet bravery, the clear purpose in the strong will and the smile. Franco is not a ‘dictator’ who presides over the triumph of a party or a section of the nation. He is the father that gathers under his command, as one big family, all the national forces of Spain. His gesture is not surly, his face is not, as Spaniards say, that of an unpleasant host. Franco excludes no one: Franco smiles and welcomes. Because under his command he has not only soldiers, Falangists or requetés [militiamen]. Under his command is the whole of Spain, the sum of all it is. His watchword is ‘integration’ – in other words, unity. The word of Rome and of Isabel and Ferdinand; and of Charles V and Philip II. The key to our history.2
A man who carried all that authority and received all that majestic flattery for almost 40 years necessarily had to be present in every manifestation of the public and social life of Spain. In the year 2000, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Franco’s death, the writer Antonio Muñoz Molina recalled that Franco was ‘the face that I saw everywhere’.3 Two years later, the historian Vicente Sánchez-Biosca corroborated that, between 1936 and 1975, Franco was ‘an icon of Spanish life, reproduced everywhere that would catch the eye of Spaniards: posters, newspapers, magazines, monuments, letters, photographs, film, television’.4
The image of Franco was, of course, present on the coins, but he was also depicted on postage stamps, in the classroom – to the right of the crucifix – on the walls of the dependencies of all government agencies and some private individuals, in street names in Spanish towns and cities, on the No-Do (the official cin
ema newsreel) in black and white, then also on the television news and as imposing equestrian statues (in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Ferrol, Santander, Jaén and elsewhere). His name was also present, pronounced both in official speeches that ended with the threefold invocation (‘Franco, Franco, Franco!’) and in Sunday sermons seeking divine protection for the Pope, the bishop of the diocese and ‘our head of state, Francisco’. His peculiar voice, a high-pitched monotone, was heard by radio or television audiences on many solemn and festive occasions: on 1 October, during the national holiday for the ‘Exaltation of the Caudillo’; on the corresponding Sunday in May on the occasion of the victory parade; on 18 July in commemoration of the start of the ‘glorious national uprising’; on 25 July during the tribute in Santiago de Compostela to the ‘patron saint of Spain’ and, above all, on 31 December in the traditional ‘message from His Excellency, the head of state, to the Spanish people’.
Given the omnipresence of Franco during his regime of absolute personal authority, his apparent disappearance from public discourse and almost from the memory of Spanish citizens since his death is striking. In fact, his non-existence and the citizenship’s virtual forgetting of the Caudillo is one of the most significant and surprising aspects of the process of political transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain between 1975 and 1978. The truth is that, even today, 125 years after his birth and after the widely covered fortieth anniversary of his death, the carefully named ‘former head of state’5 seems to be missing, unknown, silenced or forgotten by general public opinion in the country, especially among the younger generations born after his death and after the restoration of democracy.
The few informative surveys about him unreservedly and repeatedly confirm this impression of conscious absence or involuntary amnesia. For example, in 1981, the sociologist Juan José Linz conducted a broad national-level survey which, among other issues, offered respondents five ways to define their personal political attitude to the immediate collective past: ‘pro-Franco’, ‘anti-Franco’, ‘both’, ‘none’ and ‘no answer’. It is highly indicative of the degree of genuine oblivion or deliberate silence that 32 per cent chose ‘none’, in spite of the fact that all respondents were of the generation that had experienced the dictatorship as fully formed and socially active adults.6
Four years later, in 1985, on the tenth anniversary of Franco’s death, a small survey of primary and secondary school pupils conducted in the city of Madrid revealed that ‘today’s Spanish children barely know General Franco’.7 If that was the situation among those who, because of their youth, had only indirect and mediated knowledge of his character, no less revealing was the situation among those who had had a direct experience of the same. Of the 1,500 people over 18 years old who were asked about their feelings at the time of the death of Franco, the results of the survey were as follows: 30 per cent said that they had felt ‘hope’; 27 per cent ‘indifference’; 22 per cent ‘sadness’; 20 per cent ‘fear’; 9 per cent ‘liberation’; and 6 per cent ‘don’t know/no answer’. To compare the sentiments of different generations, the same survey also revealed that those over the age of 55, who had lived through the years of the Republic and the Civil War, had more feelings of sadness and fear, while young people aged 18 to 34, mostly born during the development of the 1960s, were most likely to declare feelings of hope and liberation. However, the most significant result of the survey remained the notable proportion who had felt ‘indifference’ at the death of Franco, a percentage that was basically concentrated among young people aged 18 to 25 and increasingly declined in older age groups.8
The results of a series of surveys and polls carried out in November 2000, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Franco’s death, did not vary substantially from the situation of 15 years earlier. In fact, it emphasized those trends. For example, a new survey among secondary school pupils asking for their impressions about the Caudillo demonstrated respondents’ difficulty in ‘placing him in a precise moment of history’, with replies as peculiar as they were anachronistic: ‘the king before Juan Carlos’, ‘Franco, in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa [1212]’, ‘Franco, in the Cortes de Cádiz [1812]’. Significantly, according to the author of that survey, this widespread ignorance among young people had a notable caveat: ‘the exception is in the Basque country, where young people still detected in the Franco regime the root of their conflict [Basque separatism]’.9
The first of these surveys was performed and published by the Madrid centre-left newspaper El País on 19 November 2000.10 The second was commissioned by centre-right Madrid paper El Mundo and was published on 20 November 2000.11 Significantly, their results were very similar and revealed several contradictions and notable paradoxes on the subject.
According to the survey in El País (from a sample of 1,000 people), the feelings that Franco engendered amongst Spaniards were the following: ‘indifferent’ (42 per cent); ‘negative feelings’ (38 per cent); ‘positive feelings’ (17 per cent); ‘don’t know/no answer’ (3 per cent). The question about the degree of presence and persistence of the Franco regime in Spain in 2000 received these replies: ‘definitely something in the past’ (59 per cent); ‘it has some influence’ (33 per cent); ‘still a significant influence’ (5 per cent); ‘don’t know/no answer’ (3 per cent).
In the survey by El Mundo (a sample of 800 people) almost all of those asked claimed to know ‘who Franco was’ (99 per cent). However, this positive result appeared to be mere rhetoric because the rest of the answers revealed very vague notions about him, his regime and his historical prominence. Thus, for example, responses to the question ‘Do you know how he got to power?’ gave the following results: 75.2 per cent subscribed to the correct response of ‘coup d’état’; 20.6 per cent replied ‘don’t know/no answer’; 3.2 per cent answered ‘hereditary succession’; and even 1 per cent chose ‘democratic elections’. Indecision and historical ignorance were also shown in the answers to two questions: ‘Were human rights respected under his rule?’ and ‘Did the quality of life improve under his regime?’ To the former, 12.8 per cent of respondents declined to answer or did not know how to, whereas in the latter, that percentage rose to 16.3 per cent. Also, compared to the 67 per cent who believed that Franco did not respect human rights, 20.2 per cent estimated that he did (inexplicably). Although 38.5 per cent of respondents recognized the improvement of the quality of life during the regime, 45.2 per cent denied it without hesitation (and against the historical evidence of the economic development that started in 1959 and continued until the crisis of 1973). This persistent division of views also manifested itself in the replies to the key question: ‘What image do you have of Franco?’ This ‘image’ was considered ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ by 38.1 per cent of respondents, while 33.1 per cent considered it ‘fair’, 22.5 per cent rated it as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ and a modest 6.2 per cent chose ‘don’t know/no answer’. Interestingly, that balance between favourable, unfavourable and neutral perceptions (which was also reflected to a lesser extent in the survey by El País) set itself against the result of responses to the question about ‘history’s judgement’ of Franco. An absolute majority of 53.7 per cent was convinced that it would be ‘negative’, unlike a small 19 per cent who believed it ‘positive’ and a notable 27.3 per cent who preferred not to respond.
The El País poll revealed similar (and not very disparate) percentages in the responses to its final question: ‘Do you think that anything of Franco remains in the year 2000?’, 55.3 per cent believed that there was ‘little’, 23.3 per cent argued ‘nothing’, 17.7 per cent maintained that ‘much’ remained and a mere 3.8 per cent ‘don’t know/no answer’.
The accuracy of these results was confirmed by another survey in December 2000 by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas on a sample of 2,486 people. According to it, only 10 per cent of Spaniards believed that Francoism would go down in history as a positive period for Spain, compared to 37 per cent who thought it negative and 46 per cent who felt th
at it encompassed ‘good and bad things’.12
Five years later, in November 2005, when the new socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was considering the introduction of what was later called the Ley de Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory Law), the newspaper El Mundo carried out a similar survey that corroborated something obvious: ‘opinion on Franco had worsened by 13 points in the last five years’. According to the results, 51.2 per cent of the people surveyed at that time perceived the dictator’s image as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ (compared to 38.1 per cent in 2000) and up to 86 per cent described him as ‘a dictator’ with the ‘[negative] connotations that arise from that word’.13
However, just one year later, on the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Civil War, another poll in the same newspaper produced more contrasting results: slightly more than 51 per cent of the respondents considered that ‘the coup d’état’ of July 1936 lacked ‘any justification’, while almost 30 per cent thought it was ‘born out of an existing situation of chaos and violence’ and another 19 per cent declined to answer. The division of opinion crossed partisan lines (although the majority who condemned the coup were on the left and those who justified it were on the right), but there was a clear age bias too: those who had known the Franco regime were ‘more lenient towards the coup than those whose only experience of the Franco regime was through books, the mass media or oral sources’.14
This complex situation in 2005–6 was endorsed by a macro survey carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas in the spring of 2008, after the December 2007 enactment of the Ley de Memoria Histórica, which included several measures ‘in favour of those who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and the dictatorship’ (among other things, endorsing official financing of the excavation and identification of corpses in anonymous graves).15 Of the 3,000 Spanish respondents, 41 per cent were supporters of the law, while almost 28 per cent had qualms because it could resurrect past grudges; another 13.2 per cent regarded it ‘an incomplete measure’, 3.1 per cent considered it excessive and 11 per cent had no opinion. However, this division of views on that legislation did not extend to opinions on ‘the preferred political regime’: democracy gained more than 85 per cent of the support, while only 6 per cent favoured ‘an authoritarian regime’ in certain circumstances, and another 5 per cent considered them equal. In respect of the key question about the kind of ‘feelings’ held towards the Franco regime, respondents showed the following revealing responses: rage (23.5 per cent), sadness (16.2 per cent), indifference (11.8 per cent), lack of understanding (10.5 per cent), discomfort (9 per cent), fear (8.6 per cent), do not know (7.1 per cent), other feelings (4.7 per cent) and patriotism (3.2 per cent).