Francisco Franco

Francisco Franco Bahamonde was born on 4 December 1892 in Ferrol, a naval port in Galicia. His father Nicolás was a naval paymaster, his mother Pilar a devout Catholic; the marriage broke down when the father left for Madrid. The defeat by the United States in 1898, in which Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, weighed heavily on the town and on the officer corps in which he grew up.

Because the Naval Academy admitted no new cadets between 1906 and 1913, he went to the Infantry Academy in Toledo at the age of fourteen. He graduated in 1910 in the lower half of his class, but in Morocco he quickly made a name as a cool-headed and severe officer. The colonial war in the Rif shaped him: the 'africanistas' saw themselves as the real army and looked down on politicians and on colleagues in the garrisons of the peninsula.

In July 1936 Franco joined General Mola's conspiracy late. After the coup failed he commanded the best-trained troops, the Army of Africa, and had the contacts with Hitler and Mussolini that made the airlift across the Strait of Gibraltar possible. After General Sanjurjo was killed in a plane crash, the rebel generals chose him as commander-in-chief and head of state.

As a commander he chose a slow, methodical war in which conquered territory was first 'cleansed'. He had Toledo relieved instead of pushing straight on to Madrid, conquered the north in 1937, reached the Mediterranean in April 1938 and decided the war on the Ebro and in Catalonia. After his victory he built a state without parties or free trade unions, resting on the army, the Church and the single party, with himself as 'Caudillo'.

Spain was deeply divided in the 1930s. The Second Republic (1931) introduced land reform, the separation of Church and state and autonomy for Catalonia, against the wishes of great landowners, much of the clergy and many officers. Left and right radicalised; after the election victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, strikes, land occupations and political murders increased.

In Europe democracies faced Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, and Stalin's Soviet Union. The Spanish war became an international conflict: Germany and Italy supported Franco with aircraft, tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers, the Soviet Union supplied arms to the Republic, while Britain and France held to non-intervention.

The war cost an estimated half a million lives. Behind the lines about 50,000 people were murdered on the Republican side, among them almost 7,000 clergy; in the Nationalist zone and after the war, according to historians such as Paul Preston and Julián Casanova, 130,000 to 150,000 people died in executions and killings. About half a million people fled to France at the beginning of 1939.

The first twenty years of the regime were years of hunger, rationing and autarky. Catalan, Basque and Galician were banished from public life, women lost rights the Republic had introduced, and censorship and the political police kept the opposition small. Only the Stabilisation Plan of 1959, tourism and the money sent home by migrant workers brought rapid economic growth in the 1960s.

Franco died on 20 November 1975 after a long illness in a hospital in Madrid; until shortly before his death he confirmed death sentences, and the last five executions took place in September 1975. He was buried in the Valley of the Fallen, a monument built in part by political prisoners. His designated successor Juan Carlos steered the country within three years towards free elections and a democratic constitution.

How Spain should deal with this past is still disputed. The transition to democracy rested on an amnesty and a 'pact of forgetting'; relatives have since been searching for more than a hundred thousand missing people in mass graves. Historians agree that the regime rested on large-scale violence; the debate is mainly about whether it should be called fascist or authoritarian-conservative and how it adapted in the 1960s.