Francisco Franco
ruler of Spain
WRITTEN BY
Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Author of The Franco Regime, 1936–75 and others.
Francisco Franco, in full Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde, byname El Caudillo (“The Leader”), (born December 4, 1892, El Ferrol, Spain—died November 20, 1975, Madrid), general and leader of the Nationalist forces that overthrew the Spanish democratic republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39); thereafter he was the head of the government of Spain until 1973 and head of state until his death in 1975.
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Life
Franco was born at the coastal city and naval centre of El Ferrol in Galicia (northwestern Spain). His family life was not entirely happy, for Franco’s father, an officer in the Spanish Naval Administrative Corps, was eccentric, wasteful, and somewhat dissolute. More disciplined and serious than other boys his age, Franco was close to his mother, a pious and conservative upper middle-class Roman Catholic. Like four generations and his elder brother before him, Franco was originally destined for a career as a naval officer, but reduction of admissions to the Naval Academy forced him to choose the army. In 1907, only 14 years old, he entered the Infantry Academy at Toledo, graduating three years later.
Franco volunteered for active duty in the colonial campaigns in Spanish Morocco that had begun in 1909 and was transferred there in 1912 at age 19. The following year he was promoted to first lieutenant in an elite regiment of native Moroccan cavalry. At a time in which many Spanish officers were characterized by sloppiness and lack of professionalism, young Franco quickly showed his ability to command troops effectively and soon won a reputation for complete professional dedication. He devoted great care to the preparation of his unit’s actions and paid more attention than was common to the troops’ well-being. Reputed to be scrupulously honest, introverted, and a man of comparatively few intimate friends, he was known to shun all frivolous amusements. In 1915 he became the youngest captain in the Spanish army. The following year he was seriously wounded by a bullet in the abdomen and returned to Spain to recover. In 1920 he was chosen to be second in command of the newly organized Spanish Foreign Legion, succeeding to full command in 1923. That year he also married Carmen Polo, with whom he had a daughter. During crucial campaigns against the Moroccan rebels, the legion played a decisive role in bringing the revolt to an end. Franco became a national hero, and in 1926, at age 33, he was promoted to brigadier general. At the beginning of 1928, he was named director of the newly organized General Military Academy in Saragossa.
After the fall of the monarchy in 1931, the leaders of the new Spanish Republic undertook a major and much-needed military reform, and Franco’s career was temporarily halted. The General Military Academy was dissolved, and Franco was placed on the inactive list. Though he was an avowed monarchist and held the honour of being a gentleman of the king’s chamber, Franco accepted both the new regime and his temporary demotion with perfect discipline. When conservative forces gained control of the republic in 1933, Franco was restored to active command; in 1934 he was promoted to major general. In October 1934, during a bloody uprising of Asturian miners who opposed the admission of three conservative members to the government, Franco was called in to quell the revolt. His success in this operation brought him new prominence. In May 1935 he was appointed chief of the Spanish army’s general staff, and he began tightening discipline and strengthening military institutions, although he left many of the earlier reforms in place.
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Following a number of scandals that weakened the Radicals, one of the parties of the governing coalition, parliament was dissolved, and new elections were announced for February 1936. By this time the Spanish political parties had split into two factions: the rightist National Bloc and the leftist Popular Front. The left proved victorious in the elections, but the new government was unable to prevent the accelerating dissolution of Spain’s social and economic structure. Although Franco had never been a member of a political party, the growing anarchy impelled him to appeal to the government to declare a state of emergency. His appeal was refused, and he was removed from the general staff and sent to an obscure command in the Canary Islands. For some time he refused to commit himself to a military conspiracy against the government, but, as the political system disintegrated, he finally decided to join the rebels.
Franco’s military rebellion
At dawn on July 18, 1936, Franco’s manifesto acclaiming the military rebellion was broadcast from the Canary Islands, and the same morning the rising began on the mainland. The following day he flew to Morocco and within 24 hours was firmly in control of the protectorate and the Spanish army garrisoning it. After landing in Spain, Franco and his army marched toward Madrid, which was held by the government. When the Nationalist advance came to a halt on the outskirts of the city, the military leaders, in preparation of what they believed was the final assault that would deliver Madrid and the country into their hands, decided to choose a commander in chief, or generalissimo, who would also head the rebel Nationalist government in opposition to the republic. Because of his military ability and prestige, a political record unmarred by sectarian politics and conspiracies, and his proven ability to gain military assistance from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Franco was the obvious choice. In part because he was not a typical Spanish “political general,” Franco became head of state of the new Nationalist regime on October 1, 1936. The rebel government did not, however, gain complete control of the country for more than three years.
Spanish Civil War
Nationalist troops in Irun, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War.
© Reinhard Schultz/age fotostock
Franco presided over a government that was basically a military dictatorship, but he realized that it needed a regular civil structure to broaden its support; this was to be derived mainly from the antileftist middle classes. On April 19, 1937, he fused the Falange (the Spanish fascist party) with the Carlists and created the rebel regime’s official political movement. While expanding the Falange into a more pluralistic group, Franco made it clear that it was the government that used the party and not the other way around. Thus, his regime became an institutionalized authoritarian system, differing in this respect from the fascist party-states of the German and Italian models.
As commander in chief during the Civil War, Franco was a careful and systematic leader. He made no rash moves and suffered only a few temporary defeats as his forces advanced slowly but steadily; the only major criticism directed at him during the campaign was that his strategy was frequently unimaginative. Nevertheless, because of the relatively superior military quality of his army and the continuation of heavy German and Italian assistance, Franco won a complete and unconditional victory on April 1, 1939.
The Civil War had been largely a sanguinary struggle of attrition, marked by atrocities on both sides. The tens of thousands of executions carried out by the Nationalist regime, which continued during the first years after the war ended, earned Franco more reproach than any other single aspect of his rule.
Francisco Franco
Quick Facts
born
December 4, 1892
Ferrol,
Spain
died
November 20, 1975 (aged 82)
Madrid,
Spain
title / office
· head of state, Spain (1939-1975)
political affiliation
· Falange
role in
notable family members
· spouse Carmen Polo de Franco
Franco’s dictatorship
Although Franco had visions of restoring Spanish grandeur after the Civil War, in reality he was the leader of an exhausted country still divided internally and impoverished by a long and costly war. The stability of his government was made more precarious by the outbreak of World War II only five months later. Despite his sympathy for the Axis powers’ “New Order,” Franco at first declared Spanish neutrality in the conflict. His policy changed after the fall of France in June 1940, when he approached the German leader Hitler; Franco indicated his willingness to bring Spain into the war on Germany’s side in exchange for extensive German military and economic assistance and the cession to Spain of most of France’s territorial holdings in northwest Africa. Hitler was unable or unwilling to meet this price, and, after meeting with Franco at Hendaye, France, in October 1940, Hitler remarked that he would “as soon have three or four teeth pulled out” as go through another bargaining session like that again. Franco’s government thenceforth remained relatively sympathetic to the Axis powers while carefully avoiding any direct diplomatic and military commitment to them. Spain’s return to a state of complete neutrality in 1943 came too late to gain favourable treatment from the ascendant Allies. Nevertheless, Franco’s wartime diplomacy, marked as it was by cold realism and careful timing, had kept his regime from being destroyed along with the Axis powers.
The most difficult period of Franco’s regime began in the aftermath of World War II, when his government was ostracized by the newly formed United Nations. He was labeled by hostile foreign opinion the “last surviving fascist dictator” and for a time appeared to be the most hated of Western heads of state; within his country, however, as many people supported him as opposed him. The period of ostracism finally came to an end with the worsening of relations between the Soviet world and the West at the height of the Cold War. Franco could now be viewed as one of the world’s leading anticommunist statesmen, and relations with other countries began to be regularized in 1948. His international rehabilitation was advanced further in 1953, when Spain signed a 10-year military assistance pact with the United States, which was later renewed in more limited form.
Franco’s domestic policies became somewhat more liberal during the 1950s and ’60s, and the continuity of his regime, together with its capacity for creative evolution, won him at least a limited degree of respect from some of his critics. Franco said that he did not find the burden of government particularly heavy, and, in fact, his rule was marked by absolute self-confidence and relative indifference to criticism. He demonstrated marked political ability in gauging the psychology of the diverse elements, ranging from moderate liberals to extreme reactionaries, whose support was necessary for his regime’s survival. He maintained a careful balance among them and largely left the execution of policy to his appointees, thereby placing himself as arbiter above the storm of ordinary political conflict. To a considerable degree, the opprobrium for unsuccessful or unpopular aspects of policy tended to fall on individual ministers rather than on Franco. The Falange state party, downgraded in the early 1940s, in later years became known merely as the “Movement” and lost much of its original quasi-fascist identity.
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco, 1954.
AP
Death and legacy
Unlike most rulers of rightist authoritarian regimes, Franco provided for the continuity of his government after his death through an official referendum in 1947 that made the Spanish state a monarchy and ratified Franco’s powers as a sort of regent for life. In 1967 he opened direct elections for a small minority of deputies to the parliament and in 1969 officially designated the then 32-year-old prince Juan Carlos, the eldest son of the nominal pretender to the Spanish throne, as his official successor upon his death. Franco resigned his position of premier in 1973 but retained his functions as head of state, commander in chief of the armed forces, and head of the “Movement.”
Valley of the Fallen
The Valley of the Fallen, a mausoleum located on the southern slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, is dedicated to those who died in Spain's Civil War. Francisco Franco was buried there in 1975, but his remains were exhumed and reinterred in a cemetery near Madrid in 2019.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Franco was never a popular ruler and rarely tried to mobilize mass support, but after 1947 there was little direct or organized opposition to his rule. With the liberalization of his government and relaxation of some police powers, together with the country’s marked economic development during the 1960s, Franco’s image changed from that of the rigorous generalissimo to a more benign civilian elder statesman. Franco’s health declined markedly in the late 1960s, yet he professed to believe that he had left Spain’s affairs “tied and well-tied” and that after his death Prince Juan Carlos would maintain at least the basic structure of his regime. After Franco’s death in 1975 following a long illness, his body was interred in the Valley of the Fallen, a massive mausoleum northwest of Madrid that houses the remains of tens of thousands of casualties from both sides of the Spanish Civil War. Almost immediately, Juan Carlos moved to dismantle the authoritarian institutions of Franco’s system and encouraged the revival of political parties. Spain had made great economic progress during the last two decades of Franco’s rule, and within three years of his death the country had become a democratic constitutional monarchy, with a prosperous economy and democratic institutions similar to those of the rest of western Europe. In 2019 Franco’s body was exhumed and reburied in a family crypt near El Pardo, the palace outside Madrid that had served as his official residence throughout his reign.
With affection,
Ruben
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