← New Books Network
New Books Network
Giles Tremlett, "El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco" (Oxford UP, 2025)
00:59:16
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody.
- [00:01]
B
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
C
Good day. Welcome to New Books in History, a podcast channel, New Books Network. My name is Dr. Charles Catia. I'm a host of the channel. And today we are pleased to have with us Mr. Giles Tremlett. Mr. Tremlett is a prize winning biographer and historian specializing on 20th century Spain. And today we are discussing his newest book, El Generismo, a biography of Francisco Francois, published by Oxford University Press. Welcome, Mr. Trouillette.
- [01:35]
A
Thank you very much indeed, Charles. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [01:37]
C
Why did you write this book?
- [01:40]
A
Well, I wrote this book because Francisco Franco is the most important person in Spanish history in the last two to three centuries. And that makes him a very interesting person. I think you can't understand Spain without trying to understand him. You can't understand present day Spain and you can't understand the Spain of the 20th century. So it's very important to try and work out who Francisco Franco was, why he existed and how he became who he was and what impact he then had on Spain.
- [02:25]
C
And who was Franco by way of family and social class background.
- [02:31]
A
So Franco was the son of. A navy administrator, and he came from a line of naval administrators on both sides of his family. So that's his father. His grandfathers on both sides were also very senior naval administrators. Of general rank. So they were what we might call upper class navy folk, but very much of the navy military world. And that's the world that Franco grew up in. And that shaped him considerably.
- [03:13]
C
And why did he have such a troubled relationship with his father?
- [03:17]
A
Well, his father was a sort of rather brilliant but very arrogant man who was very liberal in his attitudes. I have to explain that liberalism in Spain in the 19th century was a very big deal. Spain itself was divided very clearly between sort of liberal groups and conservative groups, and the liberals actually called themselves liberales. And so he belonged to that side of the equation of what some people called the two Spains. This is something that poets and writers were writing about early in the 19th century and again later in the 19th century, this idea that Spain was very fractured between two. Between two groups. And his father was also liberal, let's call it in the behavioral sense, which means that eventually he ran off with his girlfriend and left Franco's mother in a state of somewhat sort of humiliating singleness in Ferrol, which was their navy town. And Francisco Franco's son never forgave his father for that.
- [04:48]
C
Why did Franco go into the army rather than the navy?
- [04:52]
A
Well, Franco went into the army because the navy at the time wasn't taking people. If it had been taking people, he would have joined the navy like the rest of his family. Of course, in 1898, an American audience especially will remember that there was the American Spanish War, to Spaniards known as the disaster. El desastre 1898 is when the Spanish fleet is sunk off Cuba, one fleet and another one off the Philippines by the American navy. And so the navy itself is in a state of decline and to a certain degree, a disgrace, and is poorly funded and is not taking new recruits. So Franco opts for the army instead.
- [05:45]
C
Why was Franco's time in Spanish Morocco so important to his future career?
- [05:50]
A
Well, he himself said that without Africa, as he called it, I cannot explain myself to myself. And it's a very, very important place. Spain is fighting a colonial war in the north of Morocco. It's a place where young officers, young ambitious officers like Franco, can get ahead very quickly on the basis of sort of battlefield promotions. It's the only way to sort of to have a fast rise through the ranks in the Spanish army. And so that's where Franco has a very brilliant career, becoming the youngest general in Europe by the age of 33. But it's also where he and a group of fellow officers who become known as Africanistas, sort of develop this idea of what they're doing, which is offering their lives for Spain as something that is so exemplary that they themselves are the example for Spaniards to follow as they tried to rebuild a country which has been cast very low by the disaster of 1898. 1898 is also the end of empire for Spain. So that's four, five centuries of the Spanish Empire disappear. And that's a very difficult moment for Spain because they've really fallen from a very great height and so national morale is very low.
- [07:27]
C
Would it be true to say that even if Franco had died, say in early 1936, because of his fame that he acquired in Morocco, he'd be a figure of history, regardless of the fact that he didn't become the head of state of the nationalist Spain?
- [07:46]
A
Well, I'm not entirely sure, to tell you the truth, because one of the interesting things when the civil war broke out and there's an insurrection led by Franco and others, is you see in the foreign press some references to Franco as brother of the famous aviator. And that's because Franco's brother Ramon is a kind of Spanish Charles Lindbergh. He flies across the Atlantic to South America for the first time. And that suggests to me that Franco would have been well known, but as the youngest general, he still wasn't the most senior general. So he would have needed a bit more time, I think, to become truly famous.
- [08:37]
C
Why did he marry his wife, Carmen Polo?
- [08:41]
A
Well, he married Carmen Polo, who was a young girl at a convention in Asturias in northern Spain, when he was posted there briefly between his periods in Africa. That's where they met. It took them a long time to get married because he kept being posted back to the front. And basically she fitted his idea of a very conservative relationship in terms of his own household, his parents household. Francisco Franco had very much sided with his mother, who was very Catholic, very pious, and I think he was looking for the same thing. And that's why he ended up with Carmen Franco, who was a step up in social category as well, because she came from a much wealthier and more sophisticated family.
- [09:43]
C
What was Franco's reaction to the gulp of September 1923, and what was his overall relationship with the new head of government, Primo de Rivera?
- [09:55]
A
Well, I think to begin with, he was broadly in favor of the new government led by Primo de Rivera, who was a dictator, but they had very different opinions on how to deal with. With Morocco, with the Spanish protectorate there. Prima de Rivera was not really an Africanista, and he wanted to basically withdraw from the riskier positions, create a kind of safe zone, and then try and break out from there again to conquer the rest of the. The Spanish Protectorate, which they'd never really controlled properly. And Franco was very much a no step back sort of army officer who hated the idea of having to retreat anywhere at any time. And so to begin with, they didn't actually get on terribly well. But after a while, what happened was that Prima de Rivera actually turned out to be right in the sense that a withdrawal from the more difficult positions and then a very bold attack on the beach at Alhauthemas did actually change the whole dynamic of the war and allowed Spain, which had been fighting for years, to try and establish full control over the Protectorate, allowed it to do that. So by the end, Franco was, you know, in favor of Primo de Rivera because he had achieved, you know, the big military aim. And Franco himself was a purely military animal at the time. That was all he was interested in, his own career and the success of the Spanish army.
- [11:52]
C
What were the ethos, or I should say, what was the ethos that Franco highlighted at the Cadet academy, which he headed in the late 1920s?
- [12:03]
A
Well, he was a very interesting director of a new academy, which brought together all the different arms of the Spanish army in an attempt to sort of stop a kind of, let's call it corporate infighting, where, you know, the infantry and the cavalry and the engineers and the artillery were sort of almost factions that kind of fought against each other or jostled for power and importance and influence within the army. And the idea was to form, to have a new academy. Previously, they all had their own academies. The idea was to have them all in one, and Franco was given charge of that. And it's very interesting to see that he's learned lessons from his own time in the academy, in the infantry academy, and he actually comes up with a much more rounded curriculum, which is based more on the young potential officers learning to resolve problems, rather than just a very Spanish habit, which is still around these days, of just memorizing stuff. And so in that sense, he was really quite advanced and creative.
- [13:24]
C
What was Franco's reaction to the fall of the monarchy in 1931?
- [13:29]
A
Well, Franco was himself a monarchist. He didn't like the Republic from the beginning, but he accepted it. He swore loyalty to it, just as, you know, almost everybody in the army did, even though most officers were monarchists, but not all of them, especially not Francisco Franco's brother, Ramon, who was very much on the other side and who had actually tried to bring down the monarchy by Force of arms a bit earlier. So his attitude was really a kind of wait and see. He was basically more interested in his own career. Nobody knew what the Republic was going to be like. It was popular. The King had left voluntarily. And so it's just a question of getting on with it to begin with.
- [14:26]
C
Why was he so hesitant in coming out to support Mola's GOPO proposed Gopo in 1936?
- [14:34]
A
Okay, so in 1936, a left wing government has just been elected and parts of the army, specifically the Africanistas, are beginning to plot a coup and obviously they want Franco to join them. Franco is very hesitant, I think principally for two reasons. One is he's not sure it's going to be successful. Franco was actually very cautious, not on the battlefield as a young officer, but I think pretty much everywhere else, he was very cautious. And so, A, he wasn't sure that they were going to win. B, he was worried about the effects that would have on him and his career. So I think his hesitancy sort of comes down to those two things. I think on the sort of ideological level of being opposed to the existing government. Well, he was on exactly the same wavelength as his, as his fellow officers, but I think he really wanted to see a kind of critical mass on board before he, he would join.
- [15:50]
C
What were the variables that resulted in Franco becoming, by the winter of 1936-37, the head of, head of state of the nationalist Spain as well as being dictator?
- [16:00]
A
Well, when the, when the insurrection starts, you know, it's meant to be a coup. But even the people who are running the coup realize that their chances of capturing the big cities immediately are pretty slim. The typical thing in a coup is, you know, you capture the main ministries and the radio stations and you sort of declare yourself to be in government. In this case, they changed the plan because they knew that wouldn't work. So they decided to have different army units to send on Madrid in what they expected to be a short war. And Franco was in charge of one of those. Specifically, he was in charge of the army of Africa, which was the most experienced fighting force which came over from Morocco. So there were three, maybe four or five senior generals, all doing different things, in charge of different sections of the army, different fronts. They decided they needed a single leader. And frankly, I think Franco by that stage was a fairly obvious choice and nobody else put their hat in the ring. What is then very interesting is how Franco, in the space of just two weeks, turns this opportunity to become head of the armed forces into becoming Head of state, and not just head of state and head of the government, but also for an indefinite period of time. So it's almost a sort of mini coup within a coup where suddenly Franco has all the power and some of the people on his own side are pretty surprised by that.
- [17:55]
C
In retrospect, the unexpected death of General Sanjuro was a game changer in terms of this outcome.
- [18:05]
A
Absolutely. General Sanjurjo was meant to be the leader of the insurrection and would have been the head of the government. Unfortunately for him, he was in exile in Portugal. When a light plane went to pick him up. He got on board, and when they took off the plane, a wing caught against a tree and the plane fell back down to earth. The pilot survived, but Sanjurja didn't. He died. And so that in many ways is a stroke of luck or certainly an unexpected incident that then opens up the path for Francisco Franco to become the dictator.
- [18:55]
C
Why did Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy decide to assist Nationalist Spain?
- [19:00]
A
So that's an interesting and difficult question to answer. I think there are two different answers to that. One is that the civil war, and this is perhaps the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, is that the two sides who fronted up against each other defined themselves in negative terms. So one was anti fascist and the other was anti communist in a country where, in fact, there had been very few communists and very few fascists just six months earlier when there were elections and you could actually count the votes. So Hitler and Mussolini would have argued that they were being anti communist, and they did. But also, clearly they saw an opportunity to have an ally in Spain, but also an opportunity for them to test out their own armed forces. German rearmament was only really just getting underway in a meaningful fashion. And Hitler's new and growing army, and especially his air force hadn't really had anywhere to test themselves. And Spain was very useful in that sense. I think maybe for Mussolini it was more a sense of Spain and Italy are both southern European countries and we should be brothers in this endeavor. But he also wanted to try out his troops and indeed sent 70,000 of them to help Franco. It's important to remember that Franco's air force was 1/3 German, 1/3 Italian and 1/3 Spanish. In pilots, obviously all the aircraft were, were non Spanish. And so that was, you know, very close collaboration, very important in terms of Franco's success in the war.
- [21:09]
C
What explains Franco's ultra cautious military strategy during the Civil War?
- [21:15]
A
Well, to begin with, Franco, I think, thought along with the rest that this would be a Short war, indeed. His flying columns of army of Africa troops came up from the south and came up to Madrid, which is where I'm sitting at the moment, by the way, as we speak. And Franco himself thought that Madrid would fall by October or November 1936. In fact, they didn't have the strength to do that. And so Franco himself saw that the nature of the war was changing. And so from then on, he decided it would be a slow war that would allow him to build up sufficient forces or strength to make sure he won every battle, but which would also allow him to do the other thing he wanted to do, which was to purge the areas that he conquered of political opponents. So there were kind of two advantages to going slowly. One was he could build up a massive advantage over his opponents, but also he could use the time that gave him as he slowly went across Spain to purge the enemy, the opposition.
- [22:44]
C
Which one would be more accurate, that the Republican Spain lost the war or Nationalist Spain won the war?
- [22:51]
A
Oh, well, that's very difficult. I think I'm inclined to say that Nationalist Spain won the war. There is a lot. There's certainly a lot of people who argue that Republican Spain lost it, but I think that Franco was actually quite a good general. I think Franco is also personally responsible for some of the support that he got, especially from Germany. And so I think in that sense, he won the war. I mean, the Republic had its own problems, but I think originally those problems came for two reasons. One, most of the officer corps had gone over with Franco. Well, you know, there's nothing the Republic could do about that except train up an entire new officer corps. And the other was that it squabbled amongst itself. But really, I think, you know, most of that squabbling was over within the first six months to a year in the. Not over entirely, but over in the sense of how it impacted on what the Republic was doing and was able to do. So I'm inclined to give credit to Franco and the nationalists and say that they won, but obviously the Republicans lost as well. And the Republic might not have lost if World War II had happened a bit earlier, then that would have changed everything.
- [24:29]
C
What was Franco's personal ideology by the end of the Civil War?
- [24:35]
A
Well, I don't think Franco really had much of an ideology. He was reactionary in the literal sense, in that he thought that 19th century Spain had been a disaster. You know, he himself said that we should wipe out the history of the 19th century, that he thought Spain had become contaminated by foreign ideas. Whether that's Liberalism or Freemasonry, which was another big bugbear, or socialism or Marxism. And so in that sense he didn't really have a great ideology. He was certainly a nationalist. But I always say that Francoism was more a system of control than an ideology in itself because it will actually ideologically turn out to be very flexible later on. So to begin with, he's a nationalist and apart from that, he's also an imperialist. In fact, his early speeches are all about how Spain is going to get back an empire, something that never happens. But essentially he thinks he's rescuing Spain from the hands of dangerous left wingers. And from there on what he wants to do is to have absolute control over Spain and Spanish society and then sort of work out what to do later on.
- [26:20]
C
How could Franco, a self described Christian crusader, justify bringing into Spain Muslim forces from the army of Africa who in many cases pillaged and raped as they fought the civil war?
- [26:34]
A
Well, that's an interesting question. The answer is that, you know, the army of Africa, which was Spain's sort of colonial force, always had, you know, local or indigenous regiments who were often much better than standard Spanish army outfits. And like the British army as well, which had colonial regiments, or the French army, which also had colonial regiments, well, the Spanish army had colonial regiments too. So in that sense, to him it was just a question of manpower and fighting force. Obviously he was not interested in, in Islam, nor did he approve of it, nor did he want it to be, you know, something that took root in Spain. But in that sense he was, let's call him a pragmatist.
- [27:48]
C
Why didn't Franco not join the Axis powers in the Second World War?
- [27:53]
A
So Franco did actually reach agreements with Mussolini and with Hitler and he did support them verbally and logistically. German U boats were secretly allowed to refuel, that's their submarines in Spanish ports. The Germans were able to set up a system of a detection system for vessels going through the Strait of Gibraltar, in other words, in and out of the Mediterranean, which was a very dangerous point for Allied shipping especially. And Franco reached agreements with Hitler and with Mussolini to join the war eventually and at his own time, basically at his own pace. In the end that meant that he didn't accept for sending a volunteer unit, the Blue Division, to fight as part of Hitler's army on the Eastern front against the Soviet Union. So in a way it's a difficult question because he both did and didn't join them. And in a way it's sort of classic, classic Franco, to make people Think that he has joined them and then in the end not quite appear because the moment hasn't been right for him.
- [29:30]
C
How did Spain survive the antagonism of the victorious Allied powers in the years after 1945?
- [29:39]
A
Okay, so one of the problems that Spain has immediately in 1945 is that all these documents that were negotiated with the Germans and the Italians appear, all these agreements. And at the same time, Franco is basically the last right wing dictator still standing in Europe, apart from Salafar in Portugal. And so everybody turns against Francois. And there's a decent argument to be made that had Franco actually stood down at that stage, it would have been a good thing for Spain and for Spaniards, because things like the Marshall Plan, for example, might have arrived and certainly Spain wouldn't have become what it became, which was a pariah state. However, Franco himself was quite clever about this and he sort of turned the situation on its head and persuaded a significant number of Spaniards. We can't know exactly because there was no polling that actually that Spain itself was being victimized and that therefore they should sort of proudly stand against these horrible people in the rest of the world who wish badly on Spain. In fact, there's a wider truth which was that Franco himself embraced autarky at this stage as an economic model. In other words, he thought Spain could become completely self reliant, that it didn't really need exports or imports. And that in fact, as an ultra nationalist, he thought the answer to Spain's problems was to be more Spanish in everything and more self reliant. And so in that sense it didn't matter that much because that was his policy anyway. So the two things kind of coincide. On the one hand, Spain becomes a pariah state. On the other hand, Franco doesn't want much to do with the rest of the world anyway.
- [31:53]
C
How important to the regime was the support of the Catholic Church?
- [31:58]
A
Oh, the support of the Catholic Church was crucial in, in many senses to the regime. I mean, first of all, in its own sense of propriety, you know, Franco and his fellow officers were able to feel that their insurrection was a crusade because the Church said it was. And, and that therefore, you know, they were doing God's work and therefore doing the right thing. The Church then becomes a major ally of Franco and Franco also leans on the Church. So you will find in various procedures, administrative procedures that are put in place, whether that's deciding who needs to be denounced for their pro republican activities or who needs to be appointed to this position or that position, that the Church actually has a Say that local priests especially become quite powerful. And for Franco, the idea of a Spanish identity is tied in completely with the idea of Roman Catholicism. And so to be Spanish is to be Roman Catholic full stop. And so that's really a very, very important thing to him, which in the long run becomes very interesting because of course, later on, during his very long dictatorship, it'll be the church that changes with Vatican II and becomes a lot more liberal and open. In fact, much more so than Franco and his sort of hardcore Africanista colleagues would have liked it to be.
- [33:58]
C
Why was every regime so corrupt?
- [34:02]
A
Well, there are two theories there. One is that there was already a lot of corruption in Spain, certainly under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship. There had been another theory is that even though Franco himself wasn't personally particularly corrupt, though he did quite well out of it, and his family especially did quite well out of it. The advantages that you gain in power terms from allowing corruption to flower can be huge in the sense that one, a lot of people are going to cozy up to you because you, the regime, that is, are the people who can give, I don't know, export licenses, for example, which were crucial or on a smaller local level, ensure that the regime is turning a blind eye to your black market activities. But secondly also the fact that so many people were corrupt meant that you sort of had a lot of people who depended on you turning a blind eye, because if you suddenly decided not to turn a blind eye, they could be in a lot of trouble. And so you basically gain power because you have the capability to, let's say, arrest people on corruption or not. And when so many people are corrupt, you actually end up having power over an awful lot of people who you can just detain at any time you want because they are corrupt.
- [35:54]
C
And in point of fact, probably the two most corrupt characters in the regime, at least in the 50s, 60s, early 70s, was Franco's brother and his son in law, is that correct?
- [36:05]
A
Absolutely. Certainly his son in law and his elder brother Nicolas, who became ambassador in Lisbon, but was constantly in the middle of different business deals and himself sat on a lot of boards, as did a number of senior generals in the, in the administration. So Nicolas was very much pay to play person. And then Franco's daughter, he only had one daughter, Carmen, married actually a doctor, but he was also a minor aristocrat. So he was known as the Margheste. They. No, there's a Villaverde or Valverde, anyway, the Marquez, who also, you know, plays the game very strongly, as does his family, as does Carmen Polo's family. So they all do very well out of their contacts, out of their position close to Franco.
- [37:17]
C
Did anyone in the regime highlight the potential danger of lack of better expression, ideological contamination from the opening of the economy beginning in the mid. I'm sorry, beginning in 1957, by necessity, not by choice. Did anyone warn about the dangers that the regime's ideology would be undermined by having this influx of people from Western Europe coming to Spain?
- [37:46]
A
Yes. Well, I think their warnings came from two, from two different fronts there. One was from the Falange. The Falange was the Spanish Fascist Party, which was the sort of, let's say, ideologically purist part of the regime and had a certain sort of anti capitalist spirit to it, which meant that it did not like the sudden liberalization of the economy that happened in the late 1950s. And the other was the church itself, which saw the arrival. Mass tourism began to take off, and suddenly you were getting people arriving from northern Europe with different morals. There was a long tussle over the bikini, for example, about whether it should be worn or shouldn't be worn on. On beaches. But also there was a lot of emigration. And so in the summer you would have not only lots of tourists arriving, but you would also have a lot of migrant workers who'd gone to Northern Europe, coming back from France, from Germany, from Switzerland, from Belgium, where they'd been working, and obviously with stories of places where there was democracy and where there was a much higher standard of living and greater freedoms.
- [39:18]
C
Was it the case, though, that the police, at least in certain areas of the tourist centers in Spain, were arresting women who were wearing bikinis off the beach?
- [39:29]
A
That absolutely happened. That absolutely happened. There is one very famous incident of a British woman being arrested in Benidorm. Benidorm was this sort of this beach town that became an enormously successful tourist resort. And this woman, you're by that stage allowed to wear bikinis on the beach, but not off the beach, and she was wearing hers in a bar and the policeman tried to arrest her and she slapped him across the face. And a huge fuss was then made in the British newspapers. It even got into the Australian newspapers I saw, but also sparked a debate within the regime about what the kind of limits were for public behavior, how much they should bend in order to allow tourists from northern Europe to behave, how they would behave at home. So that was part of the debate that began in Spanish society in the 60s about where Spain was going and how out of sync it was with the rest of Europe.
- [40:54]
C
Why did Franco pick Juan Carlos as his eventual successor?
- [40:59]
A
Okay, so the relationship with Juan Carlos, who was then a prince, he was the son of, to the heir to the crown, who then became, after his own father died, then became, if Spain had still had a monarchy, would have been the king. So we can call him a kind of king, a monarch in exile. But Franco never restored the monarchy, so Spain in that sense was still a republic. And Francia wanted to be in charge for his entire life, which turned out to be a very long period of time. But there was always a question about what would happen next, what would happen after his death. An agreement was reached with Juan Gallus father that, that the young prince Juan Carlos as a small boy would be sent to Spain to be educated while his father continued living in Portugal. And that's what happened. And in a way, Juan Carlos sort of became, in the intimate sense, in the sort of familiar sense, the son that Franco never had. But also Franco himself was at heart a monarchist. And so as he looked around for a candidate to succeed him, he found someone who came from the royal family, who he personally liked, who didn't rock the boat at all while he was living in Spain, was very obedient. And so he eventually chose Juan Carlos to be his successor as and when he died.
- [43:02]
C
How important to the future democratization of Spain after Franco's death in 1975 was the assassination 1973 of the Premier Guerrero Blanco?
- [43:14]
A
Well, the death of Admiral Carrera Blanco, who was the basically the prime minister of Spain at the time, was hugely important. He was Franco's number two and had been for a very long time, for decades. In a way. He was the man also who sort of stiffened Franco's spine. It didn't need a lot of stiffening. But he was always there to ensure that Franco didn't bend to demands for greater democracy or other things that he felt were anti natural to Francoism Carrado Blanco was an awful anti Semite as well, for example. And so the feeling was that if Franco died, even if Juan Carlos became the monarch and the head of state, that a lot of power would still be in Guerrero Blanco's hand. He would have the loyalty of the armed forces of all the Francoist officials and that, you know, really he would be calling the shots. And so when he was blown up, it was an attack by etta, the armed Basque independence group, a terrorist group these days or no longer exists. They blew up his car as it drove down the street in Madrid that flew over a three, four story building and into a patio. And so it was a huge shock. And it really did mean that the future looked a lot more uncertain, meaning the future for when Franco died, which everybody assumed was going to be sometime soonish. Nobody knew when, but the feeling was very much that everybody was waiting for Franco to die and to see what would happen next. And suddenly the strongest character in the regime was no longer there.
- [45:33]
C
How important a figure in 20th century Spanish history was Franco?
- [45:37]
A
Franco was the most important person in 20th century Spanish history, there's no doubt about that. I think you could cast back over previous centuries and say he's probably more important than anybody who appeared in the 19th century as well. So he's hugely, hugely important. You know, depending on where you lived in Spain, he was your head of state and dictator for 36 to 39 years. In that time, generations of Spaniards were born, were schooled under Francoism, read the Francoist press, which was heavily censored all the way through until the late 1960s. And so he had plenty of time to shape Spaniards. One of the things he really very actively sought was for Spaniards to be politically apathetic. He thought politics per se was a bad thing, didn't consider himself to be a politician, but didn't want ordinary Spaniards to govern themselves. In fact, you know, his message to them was, you're not capable of that. That's what I'm here for.
- [46:59]
C
In point of fact. Wasn't the Franco regime, in a certain sense, the. How should I put it? Certain sense, the ideological realization of the dreams of a certain ultra conservative element in Spanish society dating back to the late 18th, early 19th century?
- [47:20]
A
Indeed. And I think it's very important to understand Franco more in terms of Spain's own history than in terms of the sort of the contemporary history of the time, you know, fascism and communism and all these other ideologies. You know, Spain had been tearing itself apart between what were known as traditionalists and liberals for a very long time. It's no coincidence that Franco's supporters included the Carlist movement. The Carlist movement were ultra reactionary Roman Catholics and they had launched three different civil wars in the 19th century. And Franco actually managed to combine them with the Falange, who were fascists, into this sort of strange thing known as El Movimiento, the movement which sort of married kind of old fashioned reactionary conservatism or traditionalism with sort of modern, forward looking sort of fascist ideology. But in many ways, and I think it's a perfectly good reading and perhaps the best reading that we can make of Franco is that he is the end of that period of what's known as the tomb of Spain's again, of this sort of fight between liberals and traditionalists. I don't think that can be separated from Spain's what I call post imperial trauma. The 19th century is also. And it loses all its empire. And I think that's also playing out at the same time. But by the time Franco dies in 1975, I sort of think it has played out. And that's why, as of 1975, you know, Spain is able to turn itself really quite quickly and remarkably into a democracy by 1978. It has a constitution that's been voted on by the Spanish people, and that constitution still stands today. And Spain has been a remarkably successful democracy since then.
- [49:59]
C
Why do you not agree with those who have a much more positive view of Francois? I'm thinking in particular the American scholar and political scientist Stanley Paine.
- [50:09]
A
Yes, I'm not sure I disagree with Stanley Paine that much. What I do think is that on several points, I would say that I don't think the Civil War was necessary. I don't think it's by any means proven that that the Spanish Republic and democracy was going to disappear under the weight of communism. Secondly, I think Franco did a huge amount of damage to Spain in the 1940s and 50s when he embraced the idea of autarky and of an isolated Spain that did terrible damage to the economy. There were at least two famines during that period. There are reports by the German ambassador who were supposedly friendly people dying on the streets. And so if we look at also the Spanish economy between 1936 and 1975, there is an argument to be made that it grew hugely, which it certainly grew hugely in the 1960s after the economy opened up and it became what we would think of these days as a tiger economy. I often say you would have to be Chinese or Vietnamese to really understand what it was like to be a Spaniard in the 1960s, to be living in an economy that's growing at 7, 8, 9% a year, where your personal prospects and those of your family look amazing, because things are changing and growth is happening so fast. But if you open the lens a bit and look at neighboring countries like Italy and Portugal, you see that they were also going that fast or in fact, faster overall. So if you wanted to compare Franco's Spain to Italy between 1936 and 1975, and yes, they both had wars, then Italy's per capita growth is superior to that of Spain. So is Portugal's. So in that sense, I think Franco was bad for Spain. I think Spain would have experienced that kind of growth anyway. I think if he'd. I often imagine what would have happened if he'd stood down in 1945. And I think Spain would have grown more and would have grown. Over a longer period of time, so there wouldn't have been a generation in the middle which lived in a certain amount of misery. So in that sense, I don't think Franco was good for Spain. I'm quite clear about that. I can see the argument obviously for people who think that he was good for Spain. I think a lot of that depends on whether you think Spain needed a civil war or not. Now that's a very difficult, difficult call because it's based on a hypothetical, isn't it? The hypothetical is was Spain saved from nasty Marxists? And like all hypotheticals, it's impossible to answer it scientifically because there is no evidence because it, you know, it never happened. So my feeling is no. And I think that if we then look at what happened in the rest of Europe, I think Spain would have been, you know, sucked into the Allied side of the equation or at least been neutral in a fashion that then would have been beneficial to it from 1945 onwards, because the United States of America and Britain and France would have looked upon it much more benevolently right from the get go instead of waiting for the Cold War to start, which is when especially the Americans began to look around for allies and saw Franklin said, ah yes, he'll do. And Franco of course, said, I told you so. If you wanted people to take one.
- [55:00]
C
Thing away from your book, what would it be?
- [55:03]
A
It would be that Franco is the most important person in Spanish history for the last couple of centuries, but also that he both explains Spanish history and is explained by it. He didn't appear out of nothing and that therefore it's worth studying and understanding him. This is something that hasn't really happened very much in Spain where he's a very divisive figure and so you get a sort of very black and white, two dimensional version of him. And so if anything, I would say anybody who's interested in Spain, including Spaniards, should study and find out and know a lot about Francisco Franco because that way you understand better Spain's past and you also understand better Spain's present.
- [56:05]
C
On that observation, I would like to thank you very much, Giles Trimlett, for being so kind to speak with us today. This is Charles Cotillon. Be listening to new books in History a podcast channel in New Books Network. Thank you, Giles Trumet, very much.
- [56:19]
A
That's my pleasure. Thank you very much, Giles.