Franco: A Concise Biography

By Gabrielle Ashford Hodges

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.

Franco joined the Spanish Army when he was barely fifteen years old. In 1926 he became the youngest general in Europe and, driven by an astonishing sense of his own greatness, was recognized as sole military commander of the Nationalist zone during the Spanish Civil War. His ambition was always to hold on to the power that he had secured. In practice, this meant winning the Spanish Civil War and surviving the fall of the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini and the international isolation that followed their defeat.

But behind the military heroics and dexterous political footwork lay an insecure and vengeful man, wracked by contradictory impulses. Although fueled by a single-minded determination to succeed, he was full of self-doubt. A bold and sometimes inspirational soldier in Africa, he became an indecisive, hesitant military commander during the Civil War. Filled with a burning conviction that his destiny was bound up with the medieval kings of Spain and God Himself, he appeared shy, withdrawn, and humble. Ruthlessly intent on wiping out all political opposition, he denied heatedly that he was a dictator. A stubborn man, he could be remarkably flexible when it came to safeguarding his power.

Gabrielle Ashford Hodges' psychological biography considers Franco's mental state, as well as his political motivation. In doing so, it succeeds admirably in getting under the skin of Europe's most enduring dictator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466856349

Gabrielle Ashford Hodges

Gabrielle Ashford Hodges is a writer and historian.

Book preview

Introduction

General Franco – Fact and Fantasy

Franco … is a man in the enviable position of believing everything that pleases him and forgetting or denying that which is disagreeable. He is, moreover, arrogant and intoxicated by adulation and drunk on applause. He is dizzy from height, sick with power, determined to hold on to it come what may, sacrificing whatever is necessary and defending his power with beak and claws. Many think he is perverse and evil but I don’t. He is crafty and cunning but I believe that he operates in the conviction that his destiny and that of Spain are consubstantial and that God has placed him in the position he occupies for great things.

General Kinderlan to Don Juan de Borbón¹

General Franco was one of four dictators who changed the face of Europe during the twentieth century. Although he appeared to lack the evil genius of Hitler, the comic charisma of Mussolini and the ruthless paranoia of Stalin, he succeeded in retaining absolute power from the moment he won the civil war in 1939 until his death in 1975. Strutting the international stage throughout much of the twentieth century, he attended the funeral of George V, fraternised with Hitler and Mussolini, confronted Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman, and was wooed by Eisenhower, Nixon and Kissinger. And yet, of all the European dictators, Franco remains the most elusive.

Full of loathing for his critical, rancorous, authoritarian father and dependent upon his devout and devoted mother, he emerges as an effeminate, inadequate individual who determined to shroud his shortcomings behind a harsh and cold façade. As an awkward, skinny child with large ears and huge mournful eyes, he did not seem marked out for great things. Derisively referred to as cerillito (little match-stick) at school and Franquito at the Military Training Academy, he was sometimes even called Generalito after becoming a brigadier. He was extremely short (he would never grow taller than 5 foot 3 inches) and increasingly portly, his hands were ‘like a woman’s and always damp with perspiration’ and his voice was ‘shrill and pitched on a high note which is slightly disconcerting since he speaks very softly – almost in a whisper’.² Even as a grown man, his military commands would sometimes burst forth in an ignominious squeak. Compared with Hitler and Mussolini his public speeches were inhibited, lacklustre affairs.

And yet, after joining the army aged fifteen, this mediocre figure ascended the military hierarchy like a meteor. A brave, impetuous and inspirational soldier in Africa, he became a general in 1926 at the age of thirty-three. A pivotal figure in the July 1936 uprising against the left-wing Second Republic, he succeeded, within two and a half months, in establishing himself as sole military commander and Head of State of the Nationalist zone. By April 1937 he had overcome all his military and political rivals through the forced unification of parties in Salamanca. During the Second World War, Franco was vigorously courted by both the Allies and the Axis powers. In the wake of the defeat of fascism, he stubbornly ignored the West’s pressure for liberalisation of his authoritarian regime. Confident of the Catholic Church’s approval for his ‘Christian Crusade’ against communism, he assumed – quite rightly – that he could sit tight ‘while the world squabbles and leaves us in peace’.³ The cold-war paranoia of the western powers vindicated his intransigence. By 1953 Hitler’s one-time admirer had survived international ostracism, consolidated his power within Spain and won himself the right to present himself publicly as the valued ally of the United States. When the so-called technocrats in his government produced an economic stabilisation plan in the late 1950s and the eventual ‘economic miracle’ resulted in a surge in living standards in Spain, the people thanked Franco.

What was it about this cold, inhibited, physically unimpressive individual – in so many ways the antithesis of the stereotypical Spanish personality – that enabled him to impose his will on a traditionally anarchic and passionate people throughout much of the twentieth century? The massive propaganda machinery that ground into action during the civil war, and dominated Spanish lives for nearly four decades, created the myth of a Caudillo or warrior-King. He was projected as an all-seeing, saintly father-figure entrusted with God’s mission to wipe out communism, separatism and Freemasonry. In fact his power derived from his ability to manipulate competing, greedy and ambitious groups, who recognised that by supporting him they would safeguard their own political supremacy. Terror that any move to remove him from power would result in another civil war did the rest. Much energy went into reminding the people of the dangers of such an eventuality. The vanquished would never be allowed to forget that they had been defeated in war. The victors had a powerful vested interest in keeping Franco in power. If he fell, they were left in no doubt that they would be abandoned to face an enemy bent on revenge.

Despite his ruthless obsession with his own survival, Franco remained convinced that he had adopted power out of a selfless concern for his people. In December 1966, just before the national referendum, the Caudillo would tell the Spanish people, ‘I was never motivated by the ambition for power. From my youngest days, they placed on my shoulders responsibilities beyond my age and my rank. I would have liked to enjoy life like so many ordinary Spaniards, but the service of the Patria monopolised my every hour and took up my life.’⁴

This startling capacity for self-delusion permeates every aspect of Franco’s life. Pompous, inflated with his own destiny and importance, convinced that his fate and that of Spain were entwined within some deified destiny, he could be shy, withdrawn and humble. Masterly at manipulating his supporters’ weaknesses and greed, and at balancing competing political factions within his regime, he pronounced himself uninterested in politics. Harsh and unforgiving with the Spanish people, he was hopelessly indulgent with his family. Frighteningly cold and unemotional, he was easily moved to tears. Stern and moralistic, he turned a blind eye to corruption within his regime. An inveterate chatterbox, he was the master of the unnerving silence. Although he commended himself on his humility, and urged his protégé Juan Carlos to adopt a simple lifestyle, he was ‘Aloof in the manner sometimes associated with royalty’ and very keen on sitting on chairs hitherto reserved for kings.⁵

Dictatorial and intolerant, he often behaved like a deprived child. (As Chief of State, when provided with his favourite meal – a stew laden with meat – he would petulantly complain ‘but I like potatoes as well’.⁶ On another occasion, when commended on his hearty appetite after a day out hunting, he replied darkly, ‘I eat well when they let me.’)⁷ Profoundly authoritarian and intolerant of opposition, Franco indignantly denied being a dictator. In 1947 he moaned, ‘I am not free, as it is believed abroad, to do what I want.’ In June 1958 he told a French journalist that ‘to describe me as a dictator is just childish’. Nevertheless, terrified of being displaced, he fiercely resisted appointing his successor until he was nearing his death. His brother-in-law Serrano Suñer, author of his political power, wrote ‘never, not for a single instant, did Franco consider letting an institution with a blood-and-flesh king overshadow the authority of his own position in which he had concentrated all the powers of the state’.⁸

Wracked with contradictions, Franco had himself been busy sowing the seeds of dissent from the moment he grasped power. The victorious Caudillo, who described the civil war as ‘the struggle of the Patria against the anti-Patria, of unity against secession, of morality against crime, of spirit against materialism,’⁹ would preside over a Spain wracked by sectarianism, swamped by materialism and steeped in corruption. The ‘unifier and centralist was dividing Spain and fomenting separatism’.¹⁰ The man who in his autobiographical film-script, Raza, sentimentally announced ‘how beautiful it is to be Spanish … Spain is the nation most loved by God’¹¹ was the same man who vengefully proclaimed his intention to ‘destroy Madrid rather than leave it to the Marxists’. Although in 1946 he claimed that ‘Our justice could not be more serene or more noble, its generosity is based solely on the supreme interests of the Patria’, his dictatorship was a harsh, partisan and corrupt affair.

One clue to the contradictions inherent within General Franco’s personality lies in the fact that – like the other European dictators – he displayed from an early age the sort of blinkered ideas and prejudices that Erich Fromm links to the sado-masochistic personality, and to ‘the authoritarian personality’ with which it is closely linked. Extensive research indicates that – like Franco – such people come from cold families who, anxious about their status in society, maintain rigid and prurient ideas about sexuality and aggression, and impose their values upon their children ‘with a heavy hand’.¹² Their neurotic offspring often display symptoms of ‘narcissistic personality disorders’, which usually occur in ‘persons who have suffered intense injuries to self-esteem in early life, compensate for this by developing a grandiose conception of themselves, and respond to attacks on their inflated self-image with rage’.¹³ They may experience the need to identify with an idealised group, and ‘condemn, reject and punish’ anyone who violates the values of that group. In the words of Norman Dixon, such a person is ‘finding and persecuting in others what he has come to fear in himself’.¹⁴ Lacking in tenderness or empathy, they are preoccupied only with themselves, their thoughts, ideas and wishes. Resolutely unaware of their own shortcomings, they display a closed, rigid attitude to life, along with a hypersensitivity to any form of criticism. They believe in supernatural forces, Fate, Nature and God as the determinants of success. Imbued with an overwhelming sense of their own uniqueness, unencumbered by feelings of ambivalence and blessed with a breathtaking capacity to lie cynically without ‘the friction of guilt’, they free their followers of all inhibitions on previously unacceptable behaviour. Driven by their own selfish needs rather than any concern for the society they control, poor at anticipating the consequences of their actions and ruthless about safeguarding their power, they can seem utterly beguiling, plausible and compelling to more socially constrained individuals. Full of admiration for the powerful, and contempt for the powerless, they yearn to gain complete mastery over others. Certainly all four dictators ‘felt uneasy with people who were [their] equals – or [their] superiors – in any respect, as is frequently the case with narcissistic and authoritarian characters’.¹⁵

According to Norman Dixon, such people often make very successful politicians and, given the opportunity to do so, will become dictators. It is, however, one thing to have dictatorial tendencies, quite another to become a dictator and yet another to remain one. This book is an investigation of the political, personal, psychological and social influences that enabled Franco, a deeply flawed individual, to suspend his own and other people’s disbelief for over forty years.

CHAPTER 1

Small Acorns

Franco and his family, 1892–1910

Rather than the qualities which raised him from the masses, it was those qualities he shared with them and of which he was a representative example that laid the foundations for his success.

Joachim Fest¹ on Adolf Hitler

Francisco Franco Bahamonde was born in the early hours of 4 December 1892 in El Ferrol, a small port in Galicia, in north-western Spain. A tiny tight-knit naval community, it was geographically, and temperamentally, cut off from the rest of Spain: America was considered more accessible than Madrid. Spanish naval ships had sailed from the port of El Ferrol throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to fight against Spain’s enemies, particularly the English. El Ferrol’s fortunes had waxed and waned alongside Spain’s imperial ventures. By the time Franco was born, it was once again enjoying a vicarious if short-lived importance as one of the three Atlantic bases from which Spain was waging war with its remaining Latin American colonies.

Franco’s forebears on his father’s side had first arrived in El Ferrol in 1737, where they established a tradition of service in the administrative branch of the navy. Franco’s great-grandfather was nearing his thirtieth birthday when news of the ‘mortal blow’ delivered to the Spanish fleet at Trafalgar reached the shocked populace of El Ferrol, home of many of the thousands of sailors who were killed or wounded during the battle. Despite the seniority attained by Franco’s ancestors, the virtual caste system that existed within the local naval hierarchy prevented the family from fraternising with the ‘real’ naval officers in the sea-going sector. What the family lacked in social status, they made up for in fertility and longevity. Franco’s great-grandfather, Nicolás Manuel Teodoro Franco y Sanchéz, lived an extremely long life during which he married three times and had fifteen children. He too had entered the administrative branch after ‘proving’ in 1794 that he was of ‘pure blood, of Hidalgo family and a man of property’,² and rose to the equivalent rank of lieutenant-colonel in the army.

One of his sons, Franco’s grandfather Francisco Franco Vietti, did even better. By the time he died in 1887, he had become a director of the Naval Administration in El Ferrol. He managed to buy a house in ‘almost the best part of the town’,³ the Calle de Maria (where Franco was born), but even he could not shunt his family up the social scale. He had five sons and two daughters. The eldest, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo, born in 1855, was to be Francisco Franco’s father. Neither Nicolás nor one of his younger sisters, Hermenegilda, brought much credit to the family name. The former horrified the local populace with his zest for women, gambling and drink, while the latter scandalised both her parents and their narrow-minded neighbours by falling passionately in love with a cousin whom she was forbidden to marry. Moving to Corunna, she would, in due course, become godmother to her errant brother’s middle son, Francisco, who would regularly visit her house during his childhood. Although ‘extremely cultured and well connected with the high society of the city’, like her older brother in El Ferrol she was ‘very eccentric’.⁴ Unlike him, she would never marry. Small, thin and spectacularly mean (as, indeed, was Nicolás), she darted through the streets of the town, with her little old servant walking several steps behind.⁵ The family propensity for longevity did not abate over the years. ‘Aunt Gilda’ died in 1940 at the age of eighty-five. Her brother died two years later aged eighty-eight. Francisco himself would die in 1975 aged eighty-three.

Despite his wild tendencies, Nicolás Franco followed the family tradition and joined the Academy of Naval Administration when he was eighteen. While Nicolás seemed to hanker after a good time rather than professional glory, he was hard working and disciplined, and eventually attained the highest possible rank of intendente-general, or vice-admiral, although this was probably due to length of service rather than professional dynamism. As a young man of twenty-one, he was dispatched to Cuba, where he fully exploited the sexual and social diversions on offer, and then to the Philippines, where he fathered an illegitimate child, Eugenió Franco Puey, with a fourteen-year-old girl. (Years later Eugenió’s son-in-law, Hipólito Escobar, would make contact with the Caudillo. To avoid any scandal, he was rapidly promoted from his job as a small-town librarian to become director of the Biblioteca Nacional.)⁶ Don Nicolás returned to a parochial El Ferrol only with the greatest reluctance. Unable to fraternise with the elite, sea-faring naval officers and unwilling to share the local preoccupation with ‘the arrival of the last ship and the fulfilment of duty and everyday gossip’,⁷ his capacity for boredom was stretched to snapping point. Nicolás was in need of a diversion.

Perhaps that was why, on 24 May 1890, aged thirty-five, he made the improbable decision to marry the deeply pious, 24-year-old Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade, daughter of the commander in charge of naval equipment in the arsenal. To begin with, Nicolás was doubtless drawn to the young Pilar’s ‘transparent beauty … oval, symmetrical face, and pensive melancholy eyes’.⁸ He may also have hankered after a stern and critical figure to curtail his unfettered appetites. It was certainly a socially advantageous match, and winning the hand of ‘one of the most beautiful and admired women in El Ferrol’ ‘satisfied his vanity and gratified his narcissism’.⁹ However, the egotistical Nicolás could not have chosen somebody more likely to disapprove of his attitudes and lifestyle. He has been described as ‘an easy-going man of the world, a rake even’¹⁰ and ‘a gay companion, a bibulous amorist with little taste for family life’¹¹ and with ‘a reputation for fast living … a free-thinking bon-viveur’.¹² In contrast, even as a young woman Pilar was ‘conservative, extremely pious, almost a saint’.¹³ In his biography of the Caudillo, the eminent psychiatrist Enrique González Duro claimed that Don Nicolás felt trapped in a relationship in which he felt ‘insufficiently matched in affection by his wife who was not at all sensual, hardly spontaneous, excessively responsible and completely identified with the traditional role of wife and mother … much more concerned with appearances than with realities’.¹⁴ Rebelling against his wife’s moralistic ways, Don Nicolás would prove to be neither a committed husband nor a devoted father.

The ill-suited couple were to have five children in quick succession: Nicolás was born on 1 July 1891, Francisco on 4 December 1892, Pilar on 27 February 1895, Ramón on 2 April 1896 and Paz, the younger daughter, on 12 November 1898. These five were not their only parental responsibilities. On 25 April 1894, Nicolás’s aunt died, leaving her husband with ten children aged between two and sixteen. He named Nicolás, his nephew and a close neighbour, as their guardian. When the uncle died as well, the younger children leant upon Doña Pilar as a second mother.¹⁵ The second youngest, Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, or Pacón as he was called, aged four at the time of his mother’s death, was extremely fond of Doña Pilar. He would shadow his younger cousin Francisco throughout his long career. His memoirs and diaries, which chronicle their almost daily contact until 1971, provide valuable insights into Franco’s early childhood, military achievements and political career.

The most profound influence upon the young Francisco was his relationship with his mother. On the basis of his own – and Pacón’s – idealised memories of her, Doña Pilar has been presented by most of Franco’s biographers as an almost perfect Madonna-like figure. Franco’s friend and first biographer, Joaquín Arrarás, describes her as ‘A mistress always of herself, her moral courage strengthened by the intensive life of her spirit, she faced life’s problems with a serenity and a fortitude that might be called stoical were they not more aptly described as Christian.’¹⁶ González Duro claims that ‘her calmness before suffering was admirable as was her tranquil smile in adversity’.¹⁷ Paul Preston refers to her as ‘a gentle, kindly serene woman [who presented to] the world a façade of quiet dignity and religious piety’,¹⁸ and Pacón solemnly proclaims that ‘her example and her deep-rooted religiosity were of the greatest value in our education’.¹⁹

In the early 1940s, Franco would write a fanciful account of his childhood, producing an autobiographical film-script entitled Raza, which charts the history of a Galician family from 1897 until the end of the civil war. Although Raza exposes more about Franco’s innermost fantasies than his actual childhood, it unwittingly reveals his underlying psychological motivations, his real attitude to his family and how this relationship fed into the prejudices that would underpin his entire political career.

In his film-script, Franco portrays Doña Pilar as the caring, warm and devoted mother, Isabel de Andrade, and insists that ‘there is no greater wisdom than that of a good mother who looks to the care and concern of her children’.²⁰ Given the religious and social constraints within which she lived, the frustrations of her husband and the personality traits of her middle son, it seems unlikely that Doña Pilar was a warm, affectionate or spontaneous wife or mother. Even George Hills, one of Franco’s more fulsome biographers, concedes that ‘the aloofness, the coldness of the adult Franco, noted so often by men who served under him’ must have had their origins in his early family circumstances.²¹

On the surface however, Doña Pilar was the perfect mother. She spent a lot of time praying. Her children were always beautifully attired. Her house was spotless. Whether this was normal behaviour for diligent housewives at that time or was more pathological in origin, it is noteworthy that Francisco would obsessively echo these tendencies throughout his life. Even as a small boy he displayed an unhealthy preoccupation with wearing the correct clothes. Throughout his life, dressing-up would be an aid to his different heroic poses.

Francisco’s relationship with his father, although quite different, was equally influential. According to Pacón, Don Nicolás was ‘a man of great intelligence’ who, like his sister Gilda, had ‘a strong character which led him to do what he felt like without worrying what people would say’.²² Like his middle son, he was full of contradictions. Fun-loving and self-indulgent in the world at large, he was a harsh disciplinarian at home. A political free-thinker with a marked sympathy for the freemasons and profound distaste for religion, he was a tyrannical authoritarian with his children. Although Pacón would fondly recall his guardian taking his sons and their young cousins for long walks and kite flying above the sea in El Ferrol, he acknowledges that he was ‘an extremely severe and austere character’ who ‘never took pride in the merits of his children’.²³ Whether Don Nicolás’s egocentric attitude and aggression towards his children was his way of venting the frustrations he felt within his marriage, or an attempt to compensate for his dissolute behaviour outside the home, there is no doubt that his behaviour was unpredictable and extreme.

Although the couple diverged on almost every issue, both Don Nicolás and his wife were determined that his sons should transcend their humble origins and join the ‘real’, sea-going, navy. Pacón particularly remembers Don Nicolás’s ‘magnificent teachings on the naval history of El Ferrol’, his blow-by-blow account of ‘the attack of the English and the landing of a fleet … on 28 August 1800’ and his determination to make ‘sure that we learnt everything about naval terminology and technology’.²⁴ It is perhaps noteworthy that, despite the yearnings of Francisco – or Paquito as he was sometimes called – to impress his father by joining the navy, only his older brother Nicolás fulfilled his father’s professional ambitions by becoming a naval engineer. Nevertheless Don Nicolás’s passion for Spanish naval history, and his preoccupation with the sea and warships, would exert an enormous influence upon Francisco’s life – as would his erratic disciplinary methods.

He regularly beat his three sons. Although he never dared to beat his daughter, Pilar, saying ‘I must either kill her or ignore her, and since I could not kill her, I ignored her’,²⁵ she later claimed that he ran ‘the house like a general’.²⁶ In her memoirs Pilar oscillates between indignant protestations that her father’s beatings were quite justified, dubious assertions that she had beaten her own children with no ill effect, and bitter memories of Don Nicolás’s violence against her brothers. Even Pacón concedes that his guardian was ‘always excessively demanding and severe’ with his children, and easily lost his temper if contradicted. There were, he records, enough anecdotes about Don Nicolás’s ill-tempered ways to fill a book.

In fact, a play was written about Don Nicolás in 1985 by the Spanish dramatist Jaime Salóm. Entitled The Short Flight of the Cock, it is based on the written and spoken testimonials of close friends and associates of the family. Although ostensibly a work of fiction, the play throws considerable light on Franco’s father and on his tempestuous relationship with his wife and children. Don Nicolás emerges as a larger-than-life personality who bridled against living in a ‘mediocre provincial city inhabited by dull people devoid of imagination’ with a wife who was more inclined to ‘say a rosary for the blessed souls in Purgatory and our departed loved ones’ than spend time with her husband. His wife is portrayed as a cold, moralistic, petty-minded snob. Don Nicolás berates her for being ‘still as a marble statue’ in bed, protests that ‘your virtue and your modesty are only a way of feeling superior to other people’ and wistfully recalls that ‘I would have given my life for a kiss … If you understood me just once…’²⁷

Whatever the truth of the matter, it certainly seems to be the case that, far from trying to resolve her marital problems, Doña Pilar invested her energies in trying to shield the family’s resolutely lower-middle-class credentials – they were allegedly forced to have lodgers to help out financially – from the probing eyes of provincial neighbours. Despite her Madonna-like reputation, there is, strangely, nothing to suggest that Doña Pilar protected any of her children from her abusive husband. Whether she believed that, tainted by original sin, they deserved everything they got, or simply felt powerless to intervene, her failure to protect her sons from Don Nicolás’s wrath may well have been perceived by them as passive collusion, or a frightening symptom of her powerlessness.

While all the children suffered in one way or another, it was the timid, withdrawn and socially conscious Francisco who inspired their father’s most overt loathing and derision. His inhibited and cautious personality did little to ignite the fervour of paternal pride or love and made it difficult for him to compete with his charismatic, extrovert, macho brothers. Perhaps his placing within the family compounded his difficulties in forging a role for himself. Nicolás was the oldest child, Ramón the youngest, and – until Francisco was five – Pilar the only daughter. Francisco was just another boy, and a rather unimpressive one at that. Extremely short, skinny and effeminate, with a high-pitched voice and huge reproachful eyes, he clearly unnerved his father. Don Nicolás was much more at ease with his other sons, who were so like him in many ways. On the basis of interviews with Franco’s older cousins on both sides of the family, George Hill describes young Nicolás as a ‘quick-witted but inattentive student’. He was an irrepressible, confident child who grew into a charismatic, fun-loving, unreliable man. Ramón – fondly remembered as ‘naughty, a madcap’ – was also blessed with a spontaneity and charm that contrasted strongly with Francisco’s stilted personality. A neighbour later observed that ‘Ramón got on very well with everyone else. The rest of the family didn’t. They thought they were superior.’ Another one recalls that Ramón was also ‘the most daring, the most cheeky, the father loved him most’. Pilar, a forthright child, was also very like her father. Constantly announcing ‘I always did what I wanted, I do what I want, and I’ll always do what I want’,²⁸ she was viewed as potentially ‘an excellent commander-in-chief had she been a man’. Francisco, on the other hand was a strikingly unremarkable child, a plodder. ‘He was meticulous; he was good at drawing but otherwise quite average, quite ordinary.’²⁹

Of the three boys, Paquito was the closest to his mother, mirroring her deceptively gentle, but disapproving expression, rigid values and moralistic outlook, sharing her ready propensity to tears and her steely and unrelenting convictions. In Salóm’s play, his exasperated father explodes that he’s ‘Always hanging on to her skirts! She’ll end up turning him into a plaster saint like his grandfather, or something worse’, and complains to his wife that ‘with your pampering and priggishness you’ve made him into a strange, timid boy’. When Pilar accuses him of hating his middle son, he indignantly denies it, but concedes that ‘he scares me sometimes. When he fixes me with those black eyes and that faraway look of his, I don’t know whether he’s showing me contempt or indifference.’³⁰ Whatever the reasons for Francisco’s irritating ways, his father ‘never let any opportunity pass to show the antipathy that he felt towards his second son who was so different from him in every respect’.³¹ Francisco’s inability to earn his father’s admiration would rankle with him throughout his life.

Profound contradictions within Francisco’s personality were evident from the start. Suspended between a subservient quest for invisibility from Don Nicolás’s wrathful eye and an indignant determination to be seen and acknowledged, he was confusing and difficult from an early age. On the one hand, he is described as a happy little boy, fishing in the quiet waters of the ria of El Ferrol, mucking around in boats, and playing pirates on the gangplanks of the ferries. On the other, he emerges as isolated, undemonstrative and cold. Desperate to impress and frantic for approval, he displayed an obstinate refusal to please. Operating within a very tight emotional range, he showed few signs of pleasure or pain, anger or delight. Even as a child he was described as ‘cold’ and yet ‘sentimental’, as unemotional and yet always getting upset about everything.³² Although he would never form close friendships, he was obsessed with playing wild childhood games with leaders and followers, goodies and baddies, during which he could resolve his feelings of powerlessness. While one of his teachers remembered him as a ‘nice lad, of a happy disposition, thoughtful: he took time answering questions but he was a playful lad’, his sister viewed him more as ‘a little old man’.³³

Physically frail and emotionally fragile, he had no compunction about flying at his significantly larger brothers when they annoyed him. Timid and vulnerable, he displayed an icy determination to avenge perceived injustices from an early age. In her memoirs, Pilar recalls the rage and bitterness with which the young Paquito nurtured a grievance after being unjustly punished by his father. But despite Francisco’s burning sense of anger, it was in fact his older brother Nicolás who bore the brunt of his father’s physical rage. Both Pilar and Pacón would recall an occasion when the young Nicolás was forced to spend an entire day under the sofa because of some transgression with his homework. As Francisco doubtless noticed, his father’s brutality towards Nicolás was tempered by his regard and affection. Having watched the often abusive, occasionally affectionate, physical encounters between his father and Nicolás, Paquito displayed a detached attitude to violence from a very early stage. His sister Pilar recalled how, when he was only eight and a half and she was six, she heated a long needle until the tip was red-hot, and pressed it on to his wrist. Instead of screaming or robustly hitting his little sister, Francisco adopted a clinical interest in the pain he was suffering, commenting merely ‘how shocking the way burnt flesh smells’.³⁴ Perhaps he learned such martyred restraint from his mother. The fastidious and fragile Paquito was undoubtedly Doña Pilar’s favoured child. If Freud is right when he argues that ‘a man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feelings of a conqueror’,³⁵ then Franco’s relationship with his mother clearly had a profound impact upon his subsequent career. Nevertheless, enraged by his father’s favouritism for Ramón, Franco’s attitude to his younger brother would be marked by a murderous rivalry throughout their lives.

And so the Franco children grew up in a profoundly unhappy household in which they were bullied physically by their liberal father, and morally by their religious mother. This would have had an enormous impact upon all their lives. Despite the fact that all three sons were very different, they would all grow into highly destructive, egotistical men who were driven by naked self-interest rather than personal responsibility. While Ramón vented his self-destructive tendencies in a number of wild and dangerous aeronautical adventures, Francisco flung himself into heroic and death-defying feats on the battlefield. Nicolás’s risk taking was vented in his involvement in corrupt ventures of one sort or another. Politically, Ramón and Nicolás, like their father, were free-thinkers, close to Freemasonry; Francisco, like Doña Pilar, was profoundly conservative. Like their father, both Nicolás and Ramón were constantly ‘chasing women’ and generally sought out the good life. Francisco, like Doña Pilar, was sexually inhibited, austere and disapproving. However, all three brothers were extremely flexible and self-serving when it came to furthering their careers. Despite his unbending views on life, Francisco was endlessly adaptable when it came to safeguarding his political power. His brother Nicolás happily jettisoned his own political beliefs in order to pave his extremely right-wing younger brother’s path to absolute power. Benefiting hugely from Franco’s corrupt regime, he became embroiled in a number of financial scandals along the way. Ramón also changed his political spots once Francisco became supreme leader in the Nationalist zone during the civil war, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Although, once Francisco had left home, he always did his best to avoid Pilar,³⁶ she too exploited the Franco name to the full once he was in power. In her memoirs, she reluctantly concedes that her good fortune in business might have derived from the fact that ‘my surname opened many doors for me’.³⁷ Only their intractable father refused to compromise his political – or personal – views in order to benefit from his son’s power. An outspoken opponent of the Nationalists during the civil war, outraged by Francisco’s close association with Hitler and appalled at the repression and widespread corruption of the regime, he was regularly arrested – and then shamefacedly released – in the 1940s for badmouthing the Caudillo in Madrid