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How Franco Ruled Spain

Two new books examine these dark decades in Spanish history.

Gen. Francisco Franco with his handpicked successor, Prince Juan Carlos of Spain, in 1975.

El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco by Giles Tremlett Buy this book

El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco

Ni una, ni grande, ni libre: La dictadura franquista by Nicolás Sesma

Ni una, ni grande, ni libre: La dictadura franquista

Half a century after his death, Francisco Franco, the military dictator who ruled Spain for nearly 40 years, still has friends in high places. “The image people have of him is that of a strict and cold man, but in private, at least with me, he was always kind, smiling, and talkative,” Juan Carlos I, the former king of Spain, says in his recent memoir. “My relationship with him was like a son to a father,” he adds. “I became king thanks to him. I have never allowed anyone to criticize him in my presence.” For a monarch who is notorious for his deceptions—financial, marital, and otherwise—these words are curiously honest.

Juan Carlos is not the only prominent Spaniard who sees little reason to distance himself from Franco. “Why would I condemn something in which my father participated?” José María Aznar, Spain’s former prime minister and éminence grise of the center-right Partido Popular (PP), said this past November to explain why his party has always been coy about breaking with the legacy of the dictatorship. Aznar’s lack of embarrassment about his family’s political history—his father and grandfather were both leading figures in the regime—is not surprising: The PP’s forerunner was founded in 1976 by Francoist officials. More alarming is how quickly the Spanish public at large has forgotten what the Franco era was really like.

In fact, the man who in 1926, at age 33, became Europe’s youngest general, who in 1939 defeated the Spanish Republic after a three-year civil war, and who died in 1975, at age 82, after ruling Spain for decades, has a growing number of admirers. According to a poll from last October, over 21 percent of Spaniards believe the years of the dictatorship were “good or very good,” including a majority in both major parties on the right—PP and the far-right Vox. In another poll, run by the newspaper El País, only half of those between 18 and 28 years old were able to correctly identify when Franco ruled, while close to half of far-right voters wrongly believed that the defenders of the Spanish Republic killed more people than their right-wing Nationalist opponents. (In fact, the Nationalists’ victims were triple those of their Republican foes.) Even in the United States, Franco’s reputation has had something of a revival: He is frequently cited with admiration by the likes of Internet commentator Mike Cernovich and Vice President JD Vance.

Last November 20 marked the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death. In 1975, his long-expected demise was followed by the swift coronation of Juan Carlos I, whom Franco had handpicked as his successor in 1969. Although the king had sworn loyalty to the regime, by 1978, mass popular mobilization, international pressure, and his desire to salvage the monarchy convinced Juan Carlos to relinquish the absolute power that Franco had granted him and accept the largely ceremonial role of constitutional monarch. The move helped usher in what would turn out to be the longest-lasting democracy in Spanish history.

How Franco’s legacy should be assessed was a question Spaniards used to be happy to avoid. In 1977, a negotiated amnesty law shielded Francoist perpetrators from prosecution (and also, in effect, from investigation). By the 1980s, as a democratic Spain burst onto the world stage, Pedro Almodóvar boasted that he made movies as if Franco had never existed. But the days when Spain could ignore its dictatorial past are over. For the past 25 years, grassroots pressure from Franco’s victims and their families has pushed left-of-center parties in Spain to address the unfinished business from the country’s transition to democracy. In 2007 and 2022, Spain passed two “memory laws,” which provide state support for families looking to recover the remains of loved ones killed by the regime but stop short of repealing the amnesty law. In 2019, the government finally removed Franco’s body from the massive state-sponsored monument in which he was buried. All of this happened over the objections of the PP and Vox, many of whose supporters see no reason to revisit the past, or who prefer to see Franco as the man who saved Spain from left-wing chaos and subversion.

In the face of these debates, the judgment of longtime Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett is unequivocal. Franco, he writes in his new biography, El Generalísimo, was “a cold-blooded militaristic authoritarian” who ended up at the helm of his country through a combination of “relentless ambition” and “considerable luck.” He is best described as “a giant dam, determined to control the flow of Spanish history—in part by holding back the societal and political changes that brought welfare and freedom to much of the Western world during his life.”

Tremlett portrays Franco as a consummate survivor, driven by boundless ambition, an absurdly inflated self-image, and sharp political instincts. His victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39)—a bloody military conflict that caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths—was won in large part thanks to support from Hitler and Mussolini, and its ultimate objective was not the country’s........

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