Francisco Franco (1892 - 1975) was a Spanish general and dictator who ruled Spain from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until his death in 1975. [1] He led the military rebellion that began the civil war in 1936, and with military assistance from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy defeated the Second Spanish Republic. [3] His regime executed and imprisoned political opponents on a mass scale, suppressed regional languages and cultures, and outlawed opposition parties and independent trade unions. [4]
Early life and military career
Franco was born on 4 December 1892 in Ferrol, Galicia, into a naval family. [1] Unable to enter the naval academy, he was admitted to the Toledo Infantry Academy and was commissioned in 1910. He volunteered for service in Spanish Morocco, where the colonial wars offered rapid promotion, and was severely wounded in 1916.
He became second-in-command and later commander of the Spanish Legion, and his role in the Rif War made him a national figure. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1926, at the age of thirty-three, and in 1928 became director of the General Military Academy in Zaragoza. [2] In 1934 he directed the suppression of the miners' uprising in Asturias, an operation conducted with considerable brutality.
The Spanish Civil War
In July 1936 Franco joined a conspiracy of army officers against the elected Popular Front government of the Second Republic. He flew to Morocco, took command of the Army of Africa and airlifted it to the mainland with German and Italian transport aircraft. [3] The coup failed to take the whole country and became a three-year civil war.
By October 1936 Franco had been proclaimed Generalísimo of the Nationalist forces and head of state. Germany and Italy supplied aircraft, armour and troops, including the Condor Legion that bombed Guernica in 1937, while the Republic received limited Soviet support. [3] Nationalist forces carried out systematic executions in captured territory. The war ended with Republican surrender in April 1939 and left several hundred thousand dead.
The dictatorship
Franco ruled as Caudillo, combining the offices of head of state, head of government and commander of the armed forces, with a single legal political movement, censorship of the press, and no independent parliament, parties or unions. [4] The years after the war brought sustained repression: tens of thousands of people were executed or died in prisons and labour camps, and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned or driven into exile.
Spain remained formally non-belligerent in the Second World War while sending the volunteer Blue Division to fight alongside German forces on the Eastern Front. [1] The Allied victory left the regime diplomatically isolated until the Cold War altered Western calculations: the 1953 Pact of Madrid granted the United States military bases in exchange for aid, and Spain entered the United Nations in 1955.
Economic policy shifted from autarky to the stabilisation plan of 1959, which opened the country to trade, investment and tourism and produced rapid growth in the 1960s. Political controls remained, and Catalan, Basque and Galician public life continued to be repressed. [4]
Death and legacy
In 1947 Franco declared Spain a kingdom with himself as regent for life, and in 1969 named Prince Juan Carlos as his successor as head of state. Franco died in Madrid on 20 November 1975. [1] Juan Carlos became king and presided over the transition to parliamentary democracy.
Franco was buried at the Valle de los Caídos, a monument built partly by the forced labour of political prisoners; his remains were moved to a family plot in 2019 under legislation on historical memory. [4] His dictatorship remains a defining and contested subject in Spanish public life, particularly regarding the mass graves and unresolved cases of its victims.
