Background

Ethnicity: Francisco Franco had Spanish (Andalusian, Galician), as well as 1/16 Italian ancestry.

Francisco Franco was born on December 4, 1892, in Ferrol, Galicia, Kingdom of Spain, to a seafaring family. His father Nicolás Franco y Salgado Araújo was an officer in the Spanish Naval Administrative Corps. His family had been naval officers for six generations, ending in Franco’s father. His mother María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade was from an upper-middle-class family. He grew up with two brothers and two sisters and was very close to his mother. He had a troubled early life as his father was an eccentric and wasteful man.

Education

The young Franco was rather active; he swam, went hunting, and played football. Until age 12, Franco attended a private school run by a Catholic priest. He then entered a naval secondary school with the goal of following his father and grandfather into a sea-based military career. But in 1907 the Spanish government, crippled by the Spanish-American war, suspended the admission of new recruits to the naval academy, forcing Franco to join the army academy instead.

Franco was forced to enlist at the Infantry Academy at Toledo instead. Franco inherited the nicknames "Franquito" or "Frankie Boy," since he would not participate in the same activities as his fellow students. He became the object of malicious bullying and initiations and graduated in the middle of his class in 1910.

Career

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. Stationed there from 1912 to 1926, Franco distinguished himself with his fearlessness, professionalism, and ruthlessness, and was frequently promoted. By 1915, at age 22, he had become the youngest captain in the Spanish army. In 1916, he was severely wounded while leading a charge. He was decorated, promoted to major, and transferred to Oviedo, Spain.

By 1920, he had been named second in command of the Spanish Foreign Legion, and three years later took full command. His stature as a military officer continued to rise rapidly. He was promoted to the rank of brigadier general (at the age of 33) by the war's end in 1926. In 1926, Franco’s role in suppressing the Moroccan rebellion earned him an appointment as general, which, at age 33, made him the youngest man in Europe to hold that post.

During the next few years, Franco commanded the prestigious General Military Academy in Saragossa, a position he would hold until three years later when political changes in Spain would temporarily halt Franco’s steady rise. This was a tumultuous period in the nation and in 1931, Spanish King Alfonso XIII was pressurized to hold democratic elections. People voted for a republic nation and this led to the fall of the Spanish Monarchy. The former king left Spain and went into exile.

The leaders of the newly formed Spanish Republic initiated a major military reform that stalled Franco’s flourishing career. In addition, the General Military Academy was dissolved and he was placed on the inactive list. However, the country was also wracked by a deepening, often violent social and political unrest, and when new elections were held in 1933, the Second Republic was replaced by a more right-leaning government. As a result, Franco returned to a position of power, which he wielded the following year in a ruthless suppression of a leftist revolt in northwestern Spain.

Political chaos in the country continued and the Spanish parliament was dissolved following a slew of scandals. New elections were announced for February 1936, in which the leftist Popular Front won. However, the new government proved to be weak and was unable to stop the nation’s social and economic structure from crumbling further. For his part, Franco was once again marginalized, with a new posting to the Canary Islands. Though Franco accepted what amounted to banishment with the professionalism for which he was known, other high-ranking members of the military began to discuss a coup.

Though he initially kept his distance from the plot, on July 18, 1936, Franco announced the Nationalist manifesto in a broadcast from the Canary Islands as the uprising began in the northwest of Spain. The next day, he flew to Morocco to take control of the troops and shortly thereafter gained the support of both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, whose planes were used to shuttle Franco and his forces to Spain. Establishing his base of operations in Seville the following month, Franco began his military campaign, advancing north toward the seat of the Republican government in Madrid.

Anticipating a swift victory, on October 1, 1936, the Nationalist forces declared Franco head of the government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. However, when their initial assault on Madrid was repelled, the military coup evolved into the protracted conflict known as the Spanish Civil War. The war resulted in the death of thousands of men and raged on for three years before the rebel government seized the reins of the country in 1939.

Nationalist forces - led by Franco and backed by right-wing militias, the Catholic Church, Germany, and Italy - battled the left-wing Republicans, who received aid from the Soviet Union as well as brigades of foreign volunteers. Though the Republicans were able to resist the Nationalist advance for a time, with far-superior military strength, Franco and his forces were able to systematically defeat them, eliminating their opposition region by region.

By the end of 1937, Franco had conquered the Basque lands and the Asturias and had also combined the fascist and monarchist political parties to form his Falange Española Tradicionalista while dissolving all others. In January 1939, the Republican stronghold of Barcelona fell to the Nationalists, followed two months later by Madrid. On April 1, 1939, after receiving an unconditional surrender, Franco announced the end of the Spanish Civil War. Sources vary, but many estimate the number of casualties resulting from the war as high as 500,000, with perhaps as many as 200,000 the result of executions perpetrated by Franco and his forces.

Many Republican figures fled the country in the wake of the civil war, and military tribunals were set up to try those who remained. These tribunals sent thousands more Spaniards to their death, and Franco himself admitted in the mid-1940s that he had 26,000 political prisoners under lock and key. The Franco regime also essentially made Catholicism the only tolerated religion, banned the Catalan and Basque languages outside the home, forbade Catalan and Basque names for newborns, barred labor unions, promoted economic self-sufficiency policies, and created a vast secret police network to spy on citizens.

Though he sympathized with the Axis powers, Franco largely stayed out of World War II (1939-1945) but did send nearly 50,000 volunteers to fight alongside the Germans on the Soviet front. Franco also opened his ports to German submarines and invaded the internationally administered city of Tangier in Morocco. Following the war, Spain faced diplomatic and economic isolation, but that began to thaw as the Cold War heated up.

During World War II, Spanish leader Franco wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called Raza, which was later turned into a film. Using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, Franco portrayed a family that strongly resembled his own, including a hero who valiantly fought against bloodthirsty Republicans.

His rule had become less violent by the 1950s. However, the suppression of non-government trade unions continued. Also, political opponents from communist and anarchist organizations and liberal democrats were suppressed. In 1953 Spain allowed the United States to construct three air bases and a naval base on its soil in return for military and economic aid. A brutal authoritarian, Francisco was not a popular ruler. However, his regime did bring about considerable economic development during the 1960s. Aging and ailing, Franco was now viewed as an elder statesman.

Unlike most dictators, he acknowledged his impending death and named Prince Juan Carlos, the grandson of Spain’s last ruling king, as his successor. However, two days after Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, Juan Carlos I set about dismantling Spain’s authoritarian apparatus and reintroduced political parties. In June 1977, the first elections were held since 1936. Spain has remained a democracy ever since.

Achievements

• 

  Francisco Franco ruled over Spain for 36 long years. Franco proved to be an astute political leader as well as a masterful military commander. The final years of his rule were relatively more liberal and Spain made considerable economic progress during the last two decades under him.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Raza

Religion

The Catholic Church was the institution that most benefitted from Franco’s victory. Franco outlawed all religions except for Catholicism. For the Church, the privileges constituted a spiritual "Reconquista" complementing the political "Reconquista" enjoyed by Franco and his Nationalists. What the political "Reconquista" meant was the return to Castilian centralism and the elimination of other ideologies. The "Reconquista" for the Church signified Catholic monopoly over the life of all Spaniards, a vital privilege if society was to be "re-Catholicised."

The privileged status of the Church was granted immediately following the Civil War. A little later - in June 1941- its rights were outlined in an agreement between the Vatican and the Franco government, and finally formalized in a Concordat signed in August 1953. Amongst the provisions were: 1. recognition of Catholicism as the official religion of the country; 2. mandatory religious instruction at all educational levels in conformity with Catholic dogma; 3. financial support of the church by the state (paying the salary of priests and contributing to the (re)construction of church buildings); 4. guaranteed representation in both press and radio.

To ensure that the Church hierarchy consisted of supportive members, Franco was granted the right to participate in the selection of bishops. The Concordat remained in effect until December 1979, a year following the implementation of a new democratic Constitution whose provisions rendered the Concordat anachronistic.

The symbiotic relationship between the Franco regime and the Church depended on both parties retaining a shared vision of each other’s role in the destiny of Spain. Each was happy to cocoon the country in a nostalgic, imperial, and Catholic past. But Franco did not let the church dictate the terms of their relationship, and Spain was in no danger of becoming a theocracy.

Politics

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 the 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 favorable 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 anti-communist 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.

Views

As part of Franco’s mission to stamp out cultural diversity in the hope of promoting Spanish nationalism, he severely restricted the country’s regional languages, more or less banning Basque, Catalan, and even the language of his own region, Galician. He banned regional names for newborn babies, banned the teaching of regional languages in schools, and ruled that all official business had to be carried out in Spanish. He also made homosexuality illegal in Spain in 1954.

Franco banned Freemasonry, Communism, and other secret societies in 1940 on the grounds that Freemasonry had caused the fall of the Spanish colonial empire in the late 19th century, and had caused the Spanish Civil War in conjunction with the Communists.

Quotations: "One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no communism."

"We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box. Spain has no foolish dreams."

"Let us be under no illusion. The rebellious spirit which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day."

Personality

Franco was a serious character, even as a child, when his short stature and high pitched voice caused him to be bullied. He could be sentimental over trivial issues, but exhibited an icy coldness over anything serious, and appeared capable of removing himself from the reality of death. He despised communism and Freemasonry, which he feared would take over Spain, and disliked both east and west Europe in the post-World War II world.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Franco's own ideology was deeply conservative but it was subordinated to the perpetuation of his own power. He maintained control by repeatedly shifting the balance of influence within the regime according to internal and external pressures, and he continued to command loyalty by allowing the self-enrichment of his elites through the institutions of the state." - Sebastian Balfour
  
  "Just like any honest man, I am against Franco and Fascism in Spain." - Ernest Hemingway
  
  "A great man...and the greatest and most representative of the Spanish people of the 20th century...one of the great leaders we have had in our history." - Manuel Fraga Iribarne

Interests

• playing cards, painting, hunting and fishing

• Politicians

  Adolf Hitler

• Artists

  Francisco Goya, Amedeo Modigliani

• Sport & Clubs

  golf, soccer, tennis, Real Madrid

• Music & Bands

  Manuel de Falla

Connections

In 1923, Francisco Franco married María del Carmen Polo y Martínez-Valdès. The couple had a daughter, María del Carmen.

Father:

Nicolás Franco

Mother:

María del Pilar Bahamonde

Spouse:

María del Carmen Polo y Martínez-Valdès

Carmen met a young military officer, Francisco Franco, in 1917. He began courting her, despite opposition from her family, which considered him socially inferior. Franco's military successes in Morocco and his persistence eventually won the family's support, and they were married in October 1923.

Daughter:

María del Carmen

María del Carmen is regarded as an icon by the remaining followers of Francoism.

Brother:

Nicolás Franco

Brother:

Ramón Franco

ally:

Adolf Hitler

With much political, financial and material support from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Franco emerged as the victor, capturing the capital of Madrid on March 28, 1939, which ended the Spanish Civil War.

Many Spanish officials said they believed Franco would have officially joined World War II if Adolf Hitler had given him French Morocco in October 1940. At the time Hitler did not want to risk damaging his relations with the new Vichy French government.

ally:

Benito Mussolini

References

• Franco: A Personal and Political Biography General Francisco Franco (1892-1975), ruler of Spain for nearly forty years, was one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in that nation's long history. This deeply researched biography treats the three major aspects of his life - personal, military, and political.
  2014
• Franco: A Concise Biography General Francisco Franco came to prominence during the days of David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson and was able to cling to absolute political power until his death in 1975. Over his fifty-year career, he became one of the four dictators who changed the face of Europe during the twentieth century.
  2000
• Francisco Franco: A Life From Beginning to End It has been several decades now since Francisco Franco’s passing in 1975, and yet his legacy still seems very much in the air. Depending on who you talk to, Franco was a fascist and a peacemaker, a destroyer and a savior, an idiot and a genius.
  2017
• Francisco Franco: The Life and Legacy of the Controversial Spanish Dictator The Spanish Civil War has exerted a powerful impact on the historical imagination. Without question, the conflict was a key moment in the 20th century, a precursor to World War II, and an encapsulation of the rise of extremist movements in the 1930s, but it was also a complex narrative in and of itself, even as it offered a truly international theatre of war.
  2018