Francisco Franco: The Little Fascist Who Could
– by Samuel Hicks (B.F.A., '08)
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco (1892-1975) remains a debated character in history. Only in the past two years, have Amnesty International and other humanitarian groups begun to uncover the 600 mass graves left by Franco during and shortly after the Spanish Civil War. A poll in November of 2005 found that 30% of the Spanish public did not realize Franco had overthrown a republican government in his rise to power. Between his authoritarian (and often cruel) rule and his ability to survive as a Fascist leader for thirty-five years, he may be one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century.
Franco was born in El Ferrol, a small naval base in northwestern Spain, to Nicolás and Pilar Franco on December 4, 1892. Nicolás was the last of a long line of naval officers; he held a high-level administrative position in El Ferrol.
Franco’s desire in life was to follow this long, ancestral line of naval officers, but due to the naval academy’s closure between 1906 and 1914, he was forced to enroll instead at the Military Academy in Toledo. He graduated in 1910. While there, he kept mostly to himself and earned the nickname El Paquito, or “little Frank.” During his life, Franco would never grow taller than 5’4.” Out of the 312 students in his class, Franco graduated 251st with the rank of second lieutenant.
From Toledo, Franco went to serve in Spanish-controlled Morocco on the northern coast of Africa. In this combative atmosphere, Franco quickly proved his bravery. So well in fact that in 1914, he became the youngest captain in the Spanish army. He was twenty-two. In battle, Franco insisted that he ride a white horse, and supposedly, flying bullets caused no fear for him. These quirks added to his reputation, and his troops equated his supposed invincibility to baraka, or divine luck.
However, he was shot in the stomach in June 1916 and returned to Spain to recover. In 1920, he accepted the position of second in command of the African Foreign Legion. His brutality as a high-ranking officer was remarkable and notorious: once, a legionnaire under his command threw food at an officer – Franco had him shot. Franco and his troops would often take the heads of Moroccan dissidents as trophies, and in one case, Franco sent a basket of flowers with two severed Moroccan heads to a school in Spain which had trained several nurses working for his legion. It was his way of thanking a school that had done so much for him.
In 1923, Primo de Rivera successfully staged a coup d’état and became the head of Spain. In February of 1926, Rivera promoted Franco to the rank of brigadier-general, making Franco the youngest general in Europe. With this promotion, Franco returned to Spain and became the director of the new Military Academy at Zaragoza.
In 1930, political troubles brewed again. Primo de Rivera fled Spain with King Alfonso XIII who, in his absence, permitted the creation of the Second Republic. This government worked to modernize Spain: to do so, it gave women the right to vote, legalized divorce, and removed the Catholic Church from public education. Franco feared this new republic. He was himself a monarchist. In 1931, the newly appointed minister of war, Manuel Azaña, closed Franco’s academy.
In 1933, conservatives took over the government and worked to remove the previous administrative reforms. Franco was promoted to major-general a year later. Shortly after this, Communist riots broke out in northern Spain. Franco, under orders to suppress the rioting, killed 4,000 Spaniards. Afterward, his superiors praised Franco for crushing the insurgency and promoted him to Chief of the General Staff.
The politics of Spain would soon change again. In 1936, the Popular Front won the elections to control government. Manuel Azaña, the reformer who closed Franco’s academy three years earlier, was elected president. Fearful of Franco’s power and ambition, Azaña relocated him to the Canary Islands.
Emilio Mola and José Sanjurjo began talking to Franco about a governmental coup. Franco and most conservatives in Spain regarded the Popular Front as a Communist organization and feared that, before long, Spain would become a Marxist state. Franco, however, was hesitant to join the cause. Talks continued, and Franco sent a letter to the Spanish Government offering to quell any dissident groups. No one in Madrid responded to Franco’s letter. Mola and Sanjurjo set the date of revolution to be July 18, 1936—“con paquito o sin Paquito” (with Franco or without Franco).
At the last moment, Franco agreed to fight with Mola and Sanjurjo. He also began trying to enlist the participation of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and on July 18, 1936, Franco flew from the Canary Islands to Morocco where his troops were located. Using a fleet of Hitler’s Junkers Ju 52 airplanes to transport his troops from Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, Franco pushed northward from southern Spain while Mola concentrated his forces in the north. Thus began the Spanish Civil War.
Hitler and Mussolini would give aid only to Franco throughout this war due to his experience as a military commander. With their support and his co-conspirator Sanjurjo’s premature death in a plane crash, Franco was able to proclaim himself generalismo, or commander-in-chief, of the Nationalist forces.
Despite their support for Franco, German and Italian forces operated independently of the Nationalist attack. This became problematic in April 1937 when the German Luftwaffe bombed the Spanish city of Guernica. The bombing lasted three hours: three quarters of the city was destroyed, and somewhere between 250 and 300 civilians were killed. This was the first instance of bombing a civilian city for the sole purpose of its destruction; this strategy was later used by Nazi forces against London and other Allied cities. When asked about the attack, Franco at first denied that the bombing had ever taken place; later, he would blame the city’s destruction on Republican forces.
The Civil War ended on April 1, 1939. A total of 500,000 people died in the conflict. Franco then dissolved all political parties (except his own) and declared himself jefe de estado (head of state).
With Spain under his control, Franco began to restore the laws active before the Second Republic: he outlawed divorce; he prevented women from voting, getting a job, or opening a bank account without approval of their husbands; and declared that he could make or unmake any law without the legislature’s approval. Pope Pius XII praised Franco’s new government for its Christian sentiments. Children of Republicans were forced into monasteries or convents; those whose parents had died fighting the Nationalists were re-baptized with different names. To give one rather curious example of Franco’s rule, “Little Red Riding Hood” was officially changed to “Little Blue Riding Hood” to eliminate the Marxist undertones present in the title.
Franco worked fiercely to eliminate any Republican sympathizer, anarchist, or Communist left in Spain after the war. Liberal-minded Spaniards fled the country. Martial law remained in place until 1948. During this time, Franco detained hundreds of thousands people suspected to be former Republicans. With the recent discovery of Franco’s mass graves, it is estimated that somewhere around 200,000 of these people were summarily executed.
Franco had accrued a heavy debt to both Mussolini and Hitler for their help throughout the civil war, but later in 1939, these debts were forgotten when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1 to mark the beginning of World War II. With his military crippled, Franco did not participate. He originally supported the Axis powers, but as the tide shifted, altered his support to the Allied forces (with the notable exception of Communist Russia).
Amidst war debts, instability, and the final days of the Great Depression, Spain was economically in shambles. It didn’t help when, after World War II, Spain was isolated from the world as the last Fascist European State. The United Nations and NATO barred Spain from membership. This isolation impoverished Spain.
However, American leaders soon realized the importance of a leader like Franco—who despised Communism—as a potential ally in the Cold War. Trade between the United States and Spain resumed in 1950, and in 1953, the Pact of Madrid cemented Spain and the U.S. as economic allies.
In 1947, Franco declared Spain to be, once more, a monarchy. His official position in state became that of regent, pending the coronation of a new king, and he held this title for the rest of his life. Very little changed politically following decades. Franco censored the media. Languages other than Spanish were all but outlawed.
Spain finally became a member of the UN in 1955. The decades to come would see little political change out of Franco, whose primary concern was to keep Spain in order rather than to build it after some political vision. Throughout the sixties, his authoritarian policies would slowly ease: the media received more freedom, and workers were allowed to strike for non-political reasons.
Time passed, and tension began to mount in 1969 as the politics of Spain continued to resemble those of the 1920s. To appease his country, Franco declared Juan Carlos de Borbón, the son of King Alfonso XIII, as his heir. Franco, now over seventy, began to deteriorate physically. He resigned from his position as leader of the state in 1973 and died from natural causes on November 20, 1975.
When compared with Hitler and Mussolini, the two prominent Fascist dictators of the twentieth century, Franco’s thirty-five year reign seems remarkable. His cautious politics kept him safe and ultimately, kept him in power. What one should make of the generalisimo is uncertain: he was cruel and his aggressive military and political tactics resonate with Stalin and Hitler. However, Franco’s story is one of success. He began at the bottom and rose to the top. What he did there may seem vile, but the cunning which brought him there is, if nothing else, remarkable.