franco a personal and political biography

“Franco is that dread thing, ‘complex. He will frustrate a desire for black-and-whiteness. . . . The new biography by Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios will tell you what to think about Franco. Even better, it will tell you how to think about him. That is a huge gift to an interested reader.” — National Review

“This highly readable and extremely insightful biography situates Franco not only in his Spanish context but also in the global context of twentieth-century dictatorships.” —Michael Seidman, Wall Street Journal

“Masterfully combines research on Franco’s life and regime with new and unique sources including Franco’s private papers and interviews with Franco’s only daughter. It will appeal to a broad readership including anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Spain, the Spanish civil war, and the Franco regime.” —Joan Maria Thomàs, University Rovira-Virgili, Spain

“Francisco Franco is the only major twentieth-century dictator to die peacefully in his bed—after almost four decades in power. His regime was brutal, despicable, and in many respects ineffectual, yet it did not join the Axis powers in World War II and was a transitional type between traditional military dictatorships and more recent totalitarian regimes. This book, impeccably based on the available sources and displaying sober judgment, could well be the definitive work on the subject.” —Walter Laqueur, author of Fascism: Past, Present, Future

“This compelling biography of Francisco Franco situates the Caudillo in his Spanish and global context. It covers every aspect of Franco’s life—from birth to death, from the political to the personal—displaying a judicious and critical understanding of this very controversial figure.” —Michael Seidman, author of The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War

“At last we are presented with a genuinely objective, balanced, above all dispassionate biography, written by two vastly experienced and distinguished scholars. The book’s cool and measured conclusions—always lucidly presented—reflect almost uncannily the meticulously pragmatic approach of the subject himself to the numberless military and political issues his career confronted. From being a twentieth-century pariah of world politics, Franco has now come into his own in terms of serious academic attention.” —Robert Stradling, author of Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War

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New in Paperback! December 2018 LC: 2014007458 DP 632 pp.   6 x 9 38 b/w photos  

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• Franco: A Personal and Political Biography

In this Book

• Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios
• Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright
• pp. vii-viii
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter 1. The Making of a Spanish Officer (1892–1913)
• Chapter 2. The Youngest General in Europe (1913–1926)
• Chapter 3. Director of the General Military Academy (1926–1931)
• Chapter 4. From Ostracism to Chief of Staff (1931–1936)
• Chapter 5. The Destruction of Republican Democracy (1936)
• pp. 100-126
• Chapter 6. Franco Becomes Generalissimo (1936)
• pp. 127-151
• Chapter 7. Forging a Dictatorship (1936–1939)
• pp. 152-171
• Chapter 8. Winning the Civil War (1936–1939)
• pp. 172-199
• Chapter 9. Franco and the Nationalist Repression (1936–1945)
• pp. 200-211
• Chapter 10. From Civil War to World War (1939–1940)
• pp. 212-230
• Chapter 11. The Great Temptation (1940–1941)
• pp. 231-260
• Chapter 12. Surviving World War II (1941–1945)
• pp. 261-283
• Chapter 13. Franco at Bay (1945–1953)
• pp. 284-341
• Chapter 14. Franco at His Zenith (1953–1959)
• pp. 342-363
• Chapter 15. Franco at Home
• pp. 364-390
• Chapter 16. Development Dictator (1959–1964)
• pp. 391-413
• Chapter 17. Facing the Future (1964–1969)
• pp. 414-430
• Chapter 18. Franco and the Modernization of Spain
• pp. 431-446
• Chapter 19. Twilight Years (1969–1974)
• pp. 447-474
• Chapter 20. The Death of Franco (1974–1975)
• pp. 475-500
• Conclusion. Franco in the Perspective of History
• pp. 501-524
• pp. 525-598
• pp. 599-617

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Franco: A Personal and Political Biography

Stanley G. Payne needs no introduction. He has a well-deserved reputation as an excellent historian who has produced, among other publications, perhaps the best guide to the study of European Fascism ( A History of Fascism, 1914–45 ). He is also the author of numerous books on Spain, some of them real landmarks in our knowledge of that country’s modern history. Payne started publishing in the decade before Francisco Franco’s death in November 1975, and in the years since his work has greatly contributed to our understanding of a period deliberately obscured by the legacy of the dictatorship (1936–75). With this, he has greatly contributed to the rebirth of civil society in democratic Spain. What is more, Payne has trained several generations of historians of Spain, many of whom continue to produce high quality works on a variety of topics. Payne’s co-author, Jesús Palacios, is a journalist and historian (in that order), well known in Spain, where he has a wide circle of admirers and friends, many of whom come from the right and far right. This position has allowed him, for example, to be the first historian to enter the archives of the Francisco Franco Foundation; it is here that the dictator’s personal documents – in what constitutes a fairly irregular arrangement – remained until recently under lock and key. In recent years Payne, too, has cultivated a wide array of contacts among conservative and far-right circles, both inside and, mostly, outside Spanish academia. He is, for example, a friend of Carmen Franco, the dictator’s daughter (on whose testimony he relies heavily throughout this book), and he has written prologues for, or endorsed the works of, controversial authors such a Pío Moa. This doesn’t mean that Payne bites his tongue in front of these people; nor does he endorse their opinions outright. In fact, his determination to say what he thinks, even if inconvenient to many, is legendary. For example, just recently, Payne explained in front of Carmen Franco and other far-right personalities that the Caudillo did indeed want to enter the Second World War and that his supposed his efforts to save Jews during that conflict are a myth.

As the book under review demonstrates, both Payne and Palacios write well; are precise and judicious with their material; and put forth a strongly conservative interpretation, both methodologically and ideologically. In methodological terms, this book is an example of the most classic political history. The cultural and social background of the dictatorship occupies a secondary position in the narrative, which focuses mainly on the deeds of its titular subject. In many ways, this book, while diametrically opposed in ideological terms, is similar in conception to the equally massive and also excellent biography of the dictator written by Paul Preston two decades ago. (1) Both books are often complementary, and both are a must read for any serious student of the subject.

Preston’s vision of Franco is clearly hostile, and this hostility extends to his analysis of the political right, particularly during the torturous life of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–39). Payne’s and Palacios’ vision is exactly the opposite. They make of the left the main culprit in the drama of the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and even – here Palacios the journalist seems to take over – of many of the problems of the country in more recent times. There are in the book a few gibes against the Socialist Party (PSOE) governments of the 1980s and 1990s. The overall result is that the Franco portrayed by Payne and Palacios is less the cunning and ruthless man depicted by Preston than the smart and hardworking Army officer who became the Caudillo (leader) as a result of, and sometimes as the preferable option to, the serious shortcomings of Spain’s democratic and/or leftist politicians since the 1930s. This is the book’s ultimate argument, and logically, where its biggest faults reveal themselves. Put differently, this biography is stronger when talking about Franco himself – on which the authors write with knowledge and precision – than when attempting to deal with the larger context in which the dictator ruled; indeed, it is here that they demonstrate a clear ideological bias. By way of disclosure, I should point out that Payne’s and Palacios’ approach is precisely the opposite of the one I employed when writing my own biography of the dictator. (2) No doubt this fact influences, and probably prejudices, how I see the book under review.

Payne, and to a lesser extent Palacios, have written widely about the role of the Spanish Army in politics. To speak of politics in Spain before the Second Republic (and, I would argue, during the Republic and much later as well) is to talk about caciquismo , the influence peddling and electoral corruption that the king, Alfonso XIII (1902–31), as well as both the Conservative and Liberal parties, used to control public life. Yet, in this book the Army in general, and Franco in particular, seem to be unburdened by the environment, practices, and effects of this corrupt political system. The result is that Franco’s meteoric rise from second lieutenant in 1912 to brigadier in 1926 (described in the chapter ‘The youngest general in Europe’) appears solely as the product of the brave and bright young man’s exploits. This explanation is not new; Franco, his minions and others, endorsed it and publicized it long ago. There is however another explanation for the young officer’s rise: the king’s meddling in military affairs, the creation of networks of patronage among senior officers and, as a result of an interaction between these two factors, the exuberant dispensation of promotions and favors to the officers fighting the colonial war in Morocco. Indeed, Franco, as the authors indicate, was the youngest general that the colonial war produced, but he was not – and this is mentioned nowhere in the book – the officer who rose fastest through the ranks during this period. That honor went to the less celebrated (now but not back then) José Sanjurjo, a soldier who in barely 13 years (1912–25) went from being an obscure captain to a lieutenant general, a Marquis, and finally, a double recipient of Spain’s highest military medal, the Laureada. (Franco did not receive this honor until 1939, when he rather immodestly awarded it to himself). Sanjurjo was soon called the Caudillo of Spain. Other officers, Franco included, were occasionally, though less prominently, referred to by the same title. Royal patronage to Franco, Sanjurjo and other officers, continued until the very end of the monarchy, in April 1931. Payne and Palacios have little to say about this.

Payne has argued before (3) – and now makes the case even more clearly – that those most responsible for the destruction of the Republic were the republicans themselves, since they lacked both realism and a democratic sense. There is much value in this analysis, and in fact there is no doubt that if General Franco became the Caudillo it is because the political crisis of 1936 made that possible. It is easy to agree with Payne and Palacios that the republicans’ at times rabid sectarianism made it easier for Franco and his fellow plotters to garner social support for their attempted coup. It is even reasonable to agree with the authors that Franco did not want to revolt in 1936, that he went ahead because he saw no better option (whether for the country, for himself, or for both is a matter of debate). However, blaming the republicans without describing what the enemies of the Republic – a faulty albeit democratic regime – were doing and saying could easily result in an unbalanced analysis. The same can be said about the nature and evolution of the violence that preceded the July 1936 uprising. Perhaps, as Payne has long argued, the left was more responsible than the right. Perhaps, as many other authors believe, the Government could have done more to stop the killings, strikes, and burnings of religious buildings. But does this mean, as Payne and Palacios argue, that the Government had lost all legitimacy by the eve of the coup? Does this justify a war that every day for nearly three years produced more victims and far more damage than all those terrible days of the spring of 1936 put together? Moreover, Payne and Palacios go further by denouncing the February elections as fraudulent and thus totally invalid. For these authors, this means that the Popular Front-backed Government was, again, illegitimate. This is an old argument of the far right, and it is completely false. While it is true that the elections in two provinces – Granada and Cuenca – were very irregular, perhaps even completely fraudulent, this does not invalidate the whole ballot or the thin but clear victory of the left. Democracy has always been evolving and certainly has never been perfect, even less as clean as its enemies sometimes hypocritically demand (only to negate it and destroy it). Consider, for example, the United States from the presidency of George Washington to that of Lyndon B. Johnson: does the fact that African Americans, both as slaves and as disenfranchised citizens, could not vote render the whole story of American democracy for over a century and a half invalid?

There are times in this book when the authors extend to Franco and his regime the full benefit of doubt. Here are two examples. The first is the Pazo de Meirás, the dictator’s palatial private residence in his native Galicia, that was, according to the dictatorship and the dictator’s family, a popular ‘gift’ (p. 213). Local residents might disagree about how voluntary this ‘gift’ was and how its acquisition was carried out. The second example is more serious because it deals with a human life. Julián Grimau, the Communist leader arrested and executed in 1963, may or may not have had a criminal ‘chekist’ past in Barcelona during the war, but the authors give full credence (page 405) to the official version that his injuries under police interrogation were the product of his attempt to escape through a window. Maybe the handcuffed man did indeed jump into a chair and then open the window and throw himself into the emptiness to commit suicide or, even worse, to embarrass the police? Or perhaps his captors went a bit too far in their session of torture? At any rate, Payne and Palacios are sure of the official version. I am not.

But these are minor points in a larger narrative that, generally speaking, presents Franco in a better light than his critics – including this reviewer – have typically done. For example, while the latter group has described Franco’s attitude towards his enemies as one of cruelty and a determination to punish very harshly and exhaustively, Payne and Palacios present the dictator as a relatively clement man, both during the war (p. 205) and after, when he supposedly gave several amnesties to prisoners in the 1940s (p. 293). In reality those were partial pardons. Amnesty for the crimes supposedly committed by his enemies during the war had to wait until 1969, 30 years after the regime had given an amnesty to its own supporters, in 1936. In the case of the latter, the decree that made it official claimed that Franco’s followers were unlikely to have committed any crimes in the first place.

Payne’s and Palacios’ largely sympathetic narrative makes Franco’s regime less exceptional and more acceptable – a tendency that is most evident when they describe the dictator’s role in Spain’s post-war modernization. The argument, in essence, is that, thanks to Franco, Spain followed the same patterns of development as other Western European nations after the conclusion of the Second World War. But this is only partially true. While Spain did indeed follow that path, it embarked on it much later. Moreover, Spain’s development was achieved at a huge individual and social cost, unthinkable in a democratic regime. The years of hunger and mismanagement under the autarky, which lasted the whole of the 1940s, are summarized by the authors as follows: ‘From the time he took power, Franco pledged to develop his country and achieve prosperity, but at first this proved entirely beyond his grasp’ (p. 431). Yet which Western democratic leader would have stayed in power from 1939 to 1950 while his policies caused a famine that killed perhaps 200,000 people, not to mention economic stagnation – made worse after 1945 – that severely affected the majority’s standard of living? This is ‘normal’? Payne and Palacios celebrate the period from 1950 to 1975 as the ‘greatest sustained economic development and general improvement in living standards in all Spanish history’ (p. 431). Once again, this is only partially true, since it applies only to the period 1960–75. In the 1950s, Spaniards’ salaries lagged well behind inflation. There was an industrial take off, and the country recovered its pre-war economic levels between 1951 and 1953 (long after other Western nations recovered from the world war that ended six years after Spain’s), but this came only at the cost of more suffering among the wage-earning population. The benefits of the first years of progress stayed in few hands. Franco made it very sweet for capital, sure, but let’s not confuse money and property with the whole of Spain. For the majority of Spaniards, the first 20 years of Franco’s dictatorship were a period of misery that had little to do with the European ‘economic miracle’ and even less to do with the ‘social pact’ that sought to distribute the fruits of that miracle.

In the last pages of the book, which cover the last years of Franco’s life, the authors describe a country living in quasi-normalcy, with notable freedoms, including that of the supposedly barely censored press (p. 480) under an increasingly benevolent grandfather-like dictator. They even argue that schools during this period were better than those created by the ‘Socialists’ in the 1980s (p. 442). In the meantime, the opposition is assumed to have been either a pathetic copy of the equally ridiculous Italian and French leftist posturing or, worse, infiltrated and manipulated by the Communists (p. 402). Many would strongly disagree, including myself: this is certainly not the country I lived in. What I remember – and what I have been writing about ever since – is how the dictator, up to the last moments of his life, continued to threaten Spaniards by presenting himself as the only alternative to a repeat of the Civil War. In essence, that is what Franco was: a violent and self-obsessed man. I may not have realized this in 1975, when Franco had just died and I was a child growing up in a repressed and ill-informed country. But this is the conclusion I have reached after decades of reading – including Payne’s earlier work – researching, and thinking about the Caudillo and his regime. But those who read Payne’s and Palacios’ book could form a very different opinion.

• Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London, 1994). Back to (1)
• Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, Franco: The Biography of the Myth (London, 2014). Back to (12)
• Stanley G. Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2006). Back to (3)

Third Mind Books

Franco: A Personal and Political Biography

ISBN: 9780299302108 Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. First Edition. Hardcover. "General Francisco Franco ruled Spain for nearly forty years, as one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in that nation's long history. He has been the subject of many biographies, several of them more than a thousand pages in length, but all the preceding works have tended toward one extreme of interpretation or the other. This is the first comprehensive scholarly biography of Franco in English that is objective and balanced in its coverage, treating all three major aspects of his life- personal, military, and political. The coauthors, both renowned historians of Spain, present a deeply researched account that has made extensive use of of the Franco Archive (long inaccessible to historians)." (from front flap) The latest (as of this writing) & most acclaimed, readable biography of General Francisco Franco (1892-1975), who prevailed in the Spanish Civil War & ruled as "El Caudillo d'Espana" until his death. Co-authors Stanley G. Payne (b. 1934, renowned emeritus History Professor at University of Wisconsin) & Jesus Palacios (b. 1952, Spanish journalist & academician) have produced a rich & broad account of Franco's life & deeds that avoids hagiography or demonization, offering a clear, concise & informative middle ground. With a section of historic captioned photographs (including of Franco greeting Salvador Dali). Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket, first edition, first printing (neither is stated per custom of this academic publisher). From the collection of George V. Buehler (1933-2020), who was a prominent real estate developer & collector in Massachusetts & Arizona. We found & have retained, between rear endpaper & paste-down, several documents relating to Buehler's purchase of this item during January 2015 (shortly after its initial publication the previous year, further indicating its FE/FP status), folded & in very fine condition. An excellent work of biography & history, in its rarest original form & with distinguished provenance. Book in very fine condition with one very small area of light rubbing at lower edge of text block nearest side edge of same; tiny bumps at lower corners of a few page leaves; otherwise substantially mint inside & out. Dust jacket very fine with only a bit of rubbing to front, back covers & spine; a few tiny bumps, creases at thin edges & corners of same. An extra handling fee will be added for shipping due to the weight of this item. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #5118]

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S tanley G. P ayne and J esús P alacios . Franco: A Personal and Political Biography .

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David A. Messenger, S tanley G. P ayne and J esús P alacios . Franco: A Personal and Political Biography ., The American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 5, December 2015, Pages 1985–1986, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.5.1985

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Stanley Payne and Jesús Palacios have written a biography of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco that they hope will be objective, fitting in between the hagiography of Ricard de la Cierva (2000) and the intense criticism of Paul Preston (1993). Franco: A Personal and Political Biography is built around their access to new archival materials in the Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco and interviews both conducted with Franco’s daughter, Carmen, in 2008. Highly readable, the book is at its heart a biography, with Franco front and center in every chapter, as well as a detailed history of his nearly forty-year regime.

One advantage of the biographical approach is to develop important arguments about Franco’s role in the regime. While scholars have long accepted that Franco was one of the last conspirators to commit to the military coup that led to the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, the authors document how quickly he not only became the leader of the Nationalist uprising, but how authoritatively he moved toward dictatorship. The importance Franco placed on establishing a new state structure with a single party totalitarian regime, the Falange , and a new, Catholic, and mobilized political culture in 1937–1938 is well documented in these pages. In the Second World War, the fact that Franco had very quickly built his own dictatorship—one that aspired to be an empire in Africa—meant that while he believed in the Axis cause, he also had a firm opinion on whether joining the Axis in the war would benefit Spain. Since Hitler did not agree to Spain’s terms, Spain stayed out. Payne and Palacios build on the idea of the coherence of Franco’s regime, at least in his own mind, for they cast his activities after the world war not just as a retreat from his affiliations with Hitler and Mussolini, but as a consistent embrace of anti-Communism and thus alliance with the U.S. in the Cold War. Simultaneously, in the early part of the 1950s, Franco sought a revitalization of the Falange ; he did not see how this contradicted with his increasing ties with the U.S. From 1953–1955 there were efforts to limit reforms in university education and reinvigorate the movement’s youth programs, which ultimately failed. The de-fascistization of the regime was only clear by 1955, which coincided with Franco’s acceptance of a monarchical regime as his ultimate successor.

After the 1950s, which the authors cast as the zenith of the regime and Franco’s command of it, the changes that would lead to the end of dictatorship in Spain appeared. With the decline of the syndicalist element of the Falange , Communists and other labor activists were given space to appeal to workers and thus provide significant opposition to Franco by the 1960s; simultaneously, “bureaucratic authoritarians” such as those associated with the Catholic organization Opus Dei increasingly took control of important government ministries, changing the nature of the regime into something far less than a movement and much closer to Miguel Primo de Rivera’s failed dictatorship of the 1920s (356). The authors do well to demonstrate not only Franco’s committed anti-Communism, but his elaborate and exaggerated fear of Freemasons, his reluctance for reform, his growing disillusionment with the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II, and his sheer inability to comprehend economic policy, which led to an extended commitment to state voluntarism and corporatism that he only reluctantly abandoned in 1959 with a program of general economic liberalization. By the mid-to-end of the 1960s, Franco was out of touch with his society and increasingly with his government as well. The consistency of Franco’s beliefs from the 1930s onwards, and how much they shaped the regime until its final stages, is an important contribution that the biographical focus—”personal and political,” as the subtitle states—makes to our understanding of Spain in the twentieth century.

Payne and Palacios acknowledge at numerous points that the regime was built upon, and maintained by, the judicial and extra-judicial repression of its opponents. The civil war and the society to be built after were grounded in concepts of a “true Spain,” represented by Franco and the Nationalists, and an “anti-Spain” that was Communist, anarchist, anticlerical, etc. (206). The nature of repression against civilian opponents, not only during the civil war, but especially in the period of “first Francoism,” from 1939 until the late 1940s, has been the subject of much scholarship in recent years. The authors propose a lower death toll than some scholars do, but one within accepted totals, and they argue that the most significant aspect of the repression was that it went further than simply counting the casualties, for the daily violence during the civil war disrupted normal life and led to a kind of generational shell shock (206). While comparisons with Stalin or Hitler are to be disregarded, Payne and Palacios state that the repression was severe but selective; ultimately, and especially after the civil war, Franco focused on his political opponents and not society at large (209). In this regard, Payne and Palacios dismiss the emphasis on slave labor in the postwar construction of Franco’s monument to the civil war dead at Valle de los Caídos, arguing it was exaggerated (361). The conclusion that repression had “recognized limits” and “respected its own rules” (211) will be unsatisfactory to some readers. Few, however, will argue with the conclusion that Franco came of age in a time of a greatly divided Spain, and that when given the opportunity, he developed and implemented his own solution to crisis, building a regime that borrowed from imperialism, authoritarianism, fascism, monarchism, and religion. The result was a very personal dictatorship that was shaped by a man who found himself caught up in Europe’s twentieth-century conflict of tradition and modernization (522).

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. General Francisco Franco (18921975), ruler of Spain for nearly forty years, was one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in that nation's long history. This deeply researched biography treats the three major aspects of his lifepersonal, military, and political. It depicts his early life, explains his career and rise to prominence as an army officer who became Europe's youngest interwar brigadier general in 1926, and then discusses his role in the affairs of the troubled Second Spanish Republic.Stanley G. Payne and Jesus Palacios examine in detail how Franco became dictator and how his leadership led to victory in the Spanish Civil War that consolidated his regime. They also explore Franco's role in the great repression that accompanied the Civil Warresulting in tens of thousands of executionsand examine at length his controversial role in World War II. This masterful biography highlights Franco's metamorphoses and adaptations to retain power as politics, culture, and economics shifted in the four decades of his dictatorship. Examines in detail how General Francisco Franco became dictator and how his leadership led to victory in the Spanish Civil War that consolidated his regime. The authors also explore Franco's role in the great repression that accompanied the Civil War and examine at length his controversial role in World War II. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780299302146

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