The photograph of General Francisco Franco Bahamonde on the cover of this biography is a close-up of the face of a man of supreme confidence, strong-featured, determined and resolute. It is the posed profile of the Spanish dictator who, joining with other authoritarian figures of 20th-century Europe, set out to save his country in July 1936 from what he perceived to be the anarchy of a left-wing government. The Spanish right had witnessed the Popular Front in 1936 becoming increasingly dominated by the internationalist forces of Moscow and the Masons. The cover photograph is the public relations image of a man with a self-discovered mission from God to defend traditional values and an anti-democratic way of governance who ruled Spain until his death in 1975. It is a picture which many tourists in the 1960s might have seen hanging dutifully in hotels and public buildings. Here was a caudillo, a general who gave his country autocratic rule, enforced centralization, transgressed the basic civil rights of citizens, banned political parties and attempted to suppress regional culture and identity.
Spain remained a pariah nation under his rule from the 1930s until the 1970s. For over 30 years this very important state was shunned by the European democracies and ostracized by international organisations. But Franco's many followers showed him great loyalty and helped create a national myth depicting the caudillo as the man who saved Spain from being taken over by international conspirators and who laid the seeds for economic prosperity and modernisation.
This new biography would strongly contest that Franco made any form of positive contribution to the development of . modern Spain The final photograph included in this biography is well chosen. It is of an elderly man in military uniform wearing a black armband. Caught by the camera in December 1973 in an uncharacteristic moment of public grief, the general is weeping for his close friend and intended successor Admiral Carrero Blanco, who had been assassinated in a Madrid suburb by the Basque revolutionary separatist group, ETA. Some would argue that the assassination removed a figure from public life that might have been capable of providing the leadership necessary to prolong the life of the Franco regime after the death of the caudillo.
Franco died in 1975. Within less than 10 years of his demise, the country's main socialist party, the PSOE, was in power. In the 1980s Spain was quickly admitted to NATO and to the European Economic Community. Democracy quickly swept away the last vestiges of authoritarianism. Streets were renamed to excise any reference to antidemocratic "heroes" of Franco's Spain. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, a founder of the Falange who had been assassinated at the start of the civil war, had given his name to many main avenidas throughout the country. He, and others like Calvo Sotelo, were removed from their positions of exaltation. Today there is no trace of Franco's Spain to be found in the public culture of the country. Democracy has been successfully restored. Autonomy has been granted to the regions. The ban on the use of regional languages has been lifted. Democracy is an enduring feature of the state. All that Franco once feared has come to pass. Yet, contrary to the propaganda of the general's regime, the country is stronger and more united than before. The pity is that dictatorship had to be endured for so long by the Spanish people before democracy could be restored to a great nation.
This new biography is not written by an admirer of the dictator. The originality of the volume lies in the writer's use of psychohistory. Take the following passage:
"While Franco's aspirations and emotional shortcomings were hardly unique, the way in which they became enmeshed with his own private dreams was. As with Hitler, war turned `the fantasy world of adolescence into reality'. Like the Fuhrer, he would use the ceremony and `dressing-up' associated with war and the military life to `conceal and glorify his personality'. Leaving the gawky child, the timid schoolboy and the mediocre cadet far behind, a resolute Franco looked resolutely to a glorious future. However, although his head was in the clouds, his feet would remain firmly on the ground."
This book tells the reader much that has been neglected in other studies about Franco's childhood, his relationship with a womanising father, his closeness to his saintly mother and his hostility to one of his brothers. This is an uncompromisingly critical book with many new insights. A greater effort might have been made to read more deeply into the Catholic traditions of Franco's Spain that helped shape the ideology of the dictator. If the reader places his/her trust in the relevance of psychohistory, then this volume is a strong contribution to the study of one of the middle-rank dictators of the 20th century. His likes will not be seen in Spain again.
Dermot Keogh is professor of history at University College Cork