Franco

by Enrique Moradiellos

  Still the unwelcome shadow of Franco keeps cropping up in public life, with the corresponding media and political agitation. It appeared with the controversy of 2001 and 2002 over the official financing of the digitization of his personal archive, jealously guarded by the Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (a private organization headed by Carmen Franco Polo, duchess of Franco, a title granted in November 1975).37 And in a funny, nostalgic film by Albert Boadella about the last two years of Franco’s life (Buen viaje, Excelencia), released in October 2003 to public and critical success. And even in satirical form with the release of the five CDs of The Golden Age of Spanish Pop in 2004, featuring a bust of the Caudillo in his later years with a blond wig, painted red lips and blue eye shadow. And in the 2010 proposal to remove Franco’s body from the crypt of the Valle de los Caídos and transfer it to the cemetery of El Pardo, where his wife’s remains already lay.38 The ghosts of the past can always be banned and exorcized, but they can never be eradicated completely or assumed to have never existed. It is an old lesson that Lord Acton confirmed more than a century ago: ‘If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and surest emancipation.’39

  This work, for all its modesty and limits, aims to contribute to the emanci­patory knowledge of the character of Franco and the Francoist regime. An understanding of the former requires a knowledge of the latter, for reasons well exposed by Ian Kershaw in his magisterial biography of a contemporary much admired by the Caudillo: ‘We need to examine the dictatorship as well as the Dictator.’40 For that reason this book is divided into three complementary parts, each studying a different aspect of the same historical phenomenon. Chapter 1, ‘The Man: A Basic Biography’, gives an insight into the human profile and life story of Franco. Chapter 2, ‘The Caudillo: A Charismatic Dictator’, looks at the socio-political and legal bases of his extraordinary power as absolute dictator, and Chapter 3, ‘The Regime: A Complex Dictatorship’, examines the character and nature of his regime of personal power.

  1

  THE MAN

  A Basic Biography

  We do not accept upon our shoulders the burden to lead Spain only to open a parenthesis of comfort, as happened with the dictatorship of Don Miguel Primo de Rivera. We accept the command and direction of Spain to stage a revolution, to make a decisive change in the life of Spain, to lead Spain and the Spaniards in the direction of greatness, restoring unity, freedom and justice.

  Speech by Franco in Madrid, 18 July 1953

  Biographies of Franco

  As a figure of great significance in the history of Spain, General Franco has been the subject of a diverse biographical literature since the Civil War. However, until relatively recently, there have been hardly any biographies of academic rigour and historiographical quality.

  Of course, 40 years of personal dictatorship generated a vast apologetic and almost hagiographic literature. In this section, five works of special importance for their impact and international market are highlighted. The first was published by the journalist Joaquín Arrarás Iribarren in 1937 and became the official version of the life of the Caudillo during the war and after. It was so well received that by October 1939 there had already been eight editions in Spain and it had been translated into English, French, German and Italian. The book would serve as a source of inspiration and information for newspaper reports and subsequent biographies due to its bombastic and obsequious style, detectable in its final paragraphs:

  Ambition, of any kind, does not motivate General Franco, when he embarks on an undertaking (to save Spain). Neither does he care about command, which he does not crave, nor human vanities, which he disregards, or material advantages, which do not interest him. In his prime he has reached those peaks which rarely crown prestigious men and cap a glorious military career. […] Franco, Caudillo of the Faith and of Honour in this solemn period of history, who accepts the most glorious and overwhelming of responsibilities. […] Franco, Crusader of the West, elected Prince of Armies in this tremendous hour, to allow Spain to accomplish the destiny of the Latin race.1

  After the end of World War II in 1945, with the victory of the Allied powers over the Italo-German Axis, that biography and similar works were outdated and unsuitable for modern times, at both national and international levels. For this reason, they were replaced by another work, by journalist Luis de Galinsoga and Lieutenant General Francisco Franco Salgado Araujo, cousin of the Caudillo and head of his military household.2 These authors took care to reflect more favourably on Franco’s ambiguous conduct towards the Allies during the recent world war, bypassing his identification with the German–Italian side, his anti-democratic diatribes and anti-Semitism for a more beneficial and cosmetic generic anti-communism. Indeed, as shown by the title (which translates as Sentinel of the West) and date of publication (1956), the work had in mind the general political situation imposed by the Cold War and Spanish military dependence on the United States following the agreements on the installation of US military bases in Spain in September 1953.

  Nearly a decade later, in 1964, there appeared a new biography of the Caudillo in the form of a documentary screenplay as part of the official campaign to commemorate ‘the 25 years of peace of Franco’. Its authors were the writer José María Sánchez Silva and the filmmaker José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, who had produced a very simple text: Franco, ese hombre (Franco: That Man). In keeping with the expanding economy at the time, which was generating in Spanish society an incipient material well-being and marked political apathy, Franco was portrayed above all as a ‘man who gave [Spain] peace, work and prosperity’. The caudillo of victory became the caudillo of peace, less heroic and more humanized, dressed in plain clothes, with a normal family life and receiving support from a people ‘united as never before with the man who won the war against communism, who miraculously preserved our neutrality and was building a better and fairer Spain’.3

  The last great laudatory biography written in the lifetime of General Franco was the work of the prolific historian Ricardo de la Cierva and plotted his career until the start of the 1970s. It was published in the form of collectible instalments by Editora Nacional during 1972 under the title of Francisco Franco: un siglo de España (Franco: A Century of Spain). The following year it appeared in book format (in two volumes) with the same title. Certainly, with its use of primary sources, its photographic accompaniments, its length and thoroughness, and even its author’s own literary capability, the work much improved on previous official biographies. And this was all with an apparent critical objectivity and political distance which in no way diminished his portrait and the favourable vision of the illustrious and humane Caudillo.4

  With the work of La Cierva, the peak of the regime’s political openness had been reached in regard to biographies of Franco. After the death of the Caudillo in November 1975, subsequent Francoist biographies (in both senses) did not surpass this achievement. However, of them all, one stands out for its documentary value: that of the medievalist Luis Suárez Fernández: Francisco Franco y su tiempo (Francisco Franco and his Time).5 The author, a former senior education policy adviser of the regime in its time of economic development and political openness, used in the text unpublished documents from the private archive of General Franco – documents guarded by the Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco and closed to the public (and even more so to historians) until very recently. Despite the invaluable and unprecedented worth of this substantial document, the work of Suárez Fernández even surpassed La Cierva in its apologetic character and lack of criticism.

  Openly confronting all the biographical literature favourable to General Franco, the divided and defeated anti-Franco opposition generated its own portraits of the Caudillo. From the time of the Civil War, these biographies were published in all sorts of formats (text, caricatures, photographs and cartoons). Varying degrees of demonology and human and political denunciation predominated, with Franco portrayed as a cunning traitor, the puppet of Hitler and
Mussolini, a tool of capitalists and landowners, an ambitious, cruel and bloodthirsty dictator, an inquisitorial Catholic fanatic and so on. By way of example were the diatribes of Salvador de Madariaga in his 1959 book General, márchese usted (General, Go) against ‘the cynical hypocrite who usurps power’ in Spain as ‘the leech of the West’ (an ingenious reference to Galinsoga and Franco Salgado-Araujo’s book).6

  However, it is evident that it was not until the 1960s that a true biography from the democratic opposition came to light: the work of ‘Luis Ramírez’, Francisco Franco: historia de un mesianismo. (Story of a Messianism).7 Hiding behind this pseudonym was the writer and Basque journalist Luciano Rincón Vega, who published under the imprint Ruedo Ibérico in Paris, a respected institution of Spanish exile in France founded in 1961. Ramirez/Rincón’s book was a huge success in anti-Franco circles in exile and in the interior, enjoying several reissues (three by 1973) and foreign-language editions, and shaping the image of Franco among his opponents inside and outside Spain.

  After the death of Franco in 1975, the process of democratic transition and the end of censorship made it possible to publish in Spain more or less critical or even hostile biographies or biographical sketches of the Caudillo. Of the many that appeared, it is worth mentioning the booklet that was mainly drawn up by the sociologist Amando de Miguel, published in 1976 under the ironic title of Franco, Franco, Franco.8 It could even be argued that in this same genre belongs, with the appropriate qualifications, the well-known literary fictions of writers Francisco Umbral (La leyenda del César visionario (The Legend of a Visionary Caesar)), Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Autobiografía del general Franco), José Luis de Vilallonga (El sable del Caudillo (The Sword of the Caudillo)), Albert Boadella (Franco y yo. Buen viaje, Excelencia (Franco and Me: Farewell, Your Excellency)) or Juan Luis Cebrián (Francomoribundia).9

  The end of the Franco regime and the establishment of the new democratic order also created the potential for an avalanche of works and accounts by witnesses and protagonists of the political dictatorship. That flow of testimonies provided whole new insights and information on the character and private behaviour of the late Caudillo. On the basis of these new eyewitness accounts and the progressive opening of state archives to researchers, the beginning of a historiographical review of the figure of General Franco became more feasible, objective and documented – a reconsideration of events that was faithful to the canonical dictates to treat history bona fides, sine ira et studio, in good faith, without partisan rancour, and a thoughtful reflection on the material available.

  Aside from minor and scattered contributions, the first fruit of this patient work of historiographic reconsideration was born in 1985, just ten years after Franco’s death, when Professor Juan Pablo Fusi published his famed short biographical essay: Franco. Autoritarismo y poder personal (published in English as Franco: A Biography).10 For his equanimous treatment and his use of the newly available supporting documents on the life and work of the General, Fusi’s essay made a definite and decisive break with previous biographies. This historiographic review deepened in 1992 (the centenary of the birth of the General) with the appearance of two works, different in scope and perspective. On one hand was the brief biographical summary drafted by the American Hispanist Stanley G. Payne, Franco, el perfil de la historia (Franco, a Profile). On the other hand was Javier Tusell’s exhaustive study of Franco during the years 1936–9, Franco en la guerra civil (Franco in the Civil War).11

  However, despite the advances in understanding Franco represented by the contributions of Fusi, Payne and Tusell, 100 years after his birth and almost on the twentieth anniversary of his death, a general biography on his character and historical performance, based on the enormous amount of testimony and archival material that was emerging, was still missing.

  This omission was amply rectified in the autumn of 1993, with the publication in England (and its translation into Spanish the following year) of a biography by the Hispanist Paul Preston, entitled simply Franco: A Biography. That work, the fruit of more than a decade’s research, was monumental in size and in the comprehensiveness of primary documentary support. The book was ‘a closed study of the man’. Its basic aim was to produce ‘a more accurate and convincing picture than had hitherto been achieved’, following Franco’s life, both private and public, during his almost 83 years of existence from 1892 to 1975.12 The critical and popular success and translations (in Spanish, Russian, Italian and Czech) are clear proof of its quality as a historical and biographical work.

  The effort started by Fusi, deepened by Payne and Tusell and culminating in the work by Preston has subsequently been completed by a long list of authors: Alberto Reig Tapia, Bartolomé Bennassar, Fernando García de Cortázar, Andrée Bachoud, again Stanley G. Payne in cooperation with Jesús Palacios, and so on.13 This tradition of biographical studies has made it possible today to reveal many of the enigmas surrounding General Franco’s public and private career, both before and after his conversion to Caudillo of Spain. At the same time, several myths developed by Franco’s hagiographers have been crushed, particularly the three dearest to the Caudillo himself: his assumed role of providential crusader who saved Spain from communism during the Civil War; his boasted ability as a cunning and illustrious statesman who knew how to preserve the neutrality of Spain during World War II; and his conscious responsibility for the implementation of the process of economic and social modernization of the 1960s. Many of the ideas espoused by the anti-Franco opposition have also been undermined: those which portrayed him as a cruel and stupid tyrant, simply serving the interests of Spanish capitalism, as a man raised to power only thanks to the help of Hitler and Mussolini and who survived for 40 years due to a simple combination of savage internal repression and good fortune internationally. The truth about the man seems to be at some midpoint that has nothing to do with geometry: he was not as great as his apologists claimed, nor as little as his detractors argue. The following pages will try to offer a well-balanced and convincing biographical portrait.

  The Forging of an Africanista

  Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde was born in the Galician coastal town of El Ferrol on 4 December 1892 into a lower middle-class family with a long tradition of naval service. He was the second son from the marriage of Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo and Pilar Bahamonde Pardo de Andrade, who had three other children: the eldest, Nicolás; the third, Pilar; and the youngest, Ramón. The solitary and shy Francisco, called ‘Cerillita’ (‘Little Matchstick’) by his classmates at school because of his shortness and extreme thinness, grew up in this small provincial town (a population of 20,000) under the influence of his conservative and pious mother and distanced from a freethinking and womanizing father.

  He first wanted to enter the Naval Academy to train to become an officer, like his brother Nicolás (unlike his younger brother Ramón, who would opt for service in the fledgling air force). However, Francisco’s desire was frustrated because, after the colonial disaster in the Spanish–American War of 1898 the Spanish fleet had been reduced to a minimum and for years there was scarcely any call for officer candidates. As an alternative, Franco was admitted into the military school the Academia de Infantería of Toledo in August 1907, when he was 14 years old, just at the moment when his father left the family home (for which Franco would never forgive him, unlike the rest of his siblings). His time in Toledo, the old Spanish capital, fashioned much of Franco’s character and basic political ideas: ‘That’s where I became a man.’14

  The Spanish army, with its rigid hierarchical command structure and obedience to orders and discipline, completely fulfilled Franco’s emotional needs and provided the shy boy with a new and secure identity. From then on, Franco would never hesitate over his vocation and profession: ‘I am a soldier,’ he claimed.15 Thus he would also be described in later years by both his friends and his enemies. Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, a conservative intellectual who knew him in Oviedo and would later finish
his life in the monarchist opposition, recalled in his memoirs: ‘Franco was a man obsessed with his career; above all he was a soldier.’ Tomás Garicano, a somewhat younger comrade in arms and one of Franco’s last ministers of the interior, agreed: ‘raised in a naval family, and naturally destined for a military life, it appears (and I think this is the truth) that the military code is his standard for living.’16

  Indeed, with the trauma of the colonial disaster of 1898, the rising of socio-political conflicts in the country and in the heat of the new and bloody war waged in the north of Morocco, Franco adopted a good part of the political and ideological baggage of the military of that time during his years as a cadet. Above all, he endorsed a fiery, unitarian Spanish nationalism, nostalgic for past imperial glories, suspicious of the outside world that had remained impassive to the unequal confrontation with the American colossus in 1898, and extremely hostile to the emerging peripheral regionalist and nationalist movements that dared to question the unity of the fatherland. The prolific historical work of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo was the basic intellectual foundation of his hyper-nationalistic retrospection and identification between the fatherland and Catholic orthodoxy:

  The Church nurtured us, with its martyrs and confessors, with its saints, with its admirable system of synods. Through it we were a nation and a great nation, rather than a multitude of nations, born to be the target for any greedy neighbour […] Spain, the evangelist for half of the globe; Spain, the hammer of the heretics, the light of Trent, the sword of Rome, the cradle of San Ignatius; this is our greatness and our unity: we have no other. The day when that is lost, Spain will return to the fiefdoms of the Arevacos and the Vectones [of ancient times], or to the Kingdoms of Taifas [of the Middle Ages].17

  Complementary to this fundamentalist nationalism was a militaristic view of political life and public order that saw the army as a praetorian institution virtually autonomous from civil authorities and sometimes, in internal or external emergencies, superior to them by its status as the ‘backbone of Spain’. Thus had proclaimed King Alfonso XIII in 1902 when he ascended to the throne aged only 16: