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Emerging in the early 20th century as Europe's youngest general since Napoleon Bonaparte, Francisco Franco was destined to make waves.
But how did this uncharismatic reactionary become Spain's dictator, dominating the country for nearly four decades?
In this Life of the Week episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Bird speaks to journalist Giles Tremlett about the life of the man who continued to haunt Spain more than 50 years after his death in 1975.
Giles, what kind of world was Franco born into?
What was happening in Spain during his youth?
Well, Franco was born into a Spain that had fallen from its moment of glory.
Spain had the world's greatest empire for many centuries, and it had just lost that in the 19th century, and so was suffering a state of almost existential anxiety about what it was and how important Spain was and how important Spaniards themselves were.
And could you tell me a little bit about his early experiences, the family he was born into, the part of Spain he grew up in
Well, Francisco Franco is the son of a very senior Navy accountant, basically.
But he grows up in a naval port and he also grows up in a home which is very divided.
He has a very liberal father and a very conservative mother.
His very liberal father will very liberally abandon the family for another woman, humiliating the mother.
And as a result, Franco will choose to be loyal to his mother.
He's something of a mummy's boy in that sense.
But it does mean that he's already, as a young man, as a teenager, chosen which side of Spain's historic divide between liberals and conservatives he is on.
What you've said there is very interesting in terms of that early experience of paternal portrayal.
Are there any other experiences in his childhood that you think shaped his personality going into his adulthood?
Well, he lives in Ferrol in this navy town.
And when he's very small five years old is when Spain is humiliated in Cuba and in the Philippines.
When it finally loses its empire, its two fleets are sunk by the Americans in both places.
It went down in history in Spain as el desastre.
It's the disaster.
And it really marks the end of the empire.
But it's especially severe for the Navy and for anyone brought up in this Navy atmosphere, because they're the ones who really lost the battles and felt the humiliation more than anybody else.
So that's very important, to combine then, with his family atmosphere, where we have this contest between what's historically known as the two Spains.
You say in your book that this wasn't an ordinary Spanish family.
You mentioned that in the bedroom where Franco and his brother grew up, you have these two boys who go on to have momentous lives in different respects.
Could you tell me a little bit about that?
Yes, I mean, there's quite an extraordinary family in many ways.
So Francisco Franco will share a bedroom with his younger brother, Ramon Franco.
Ramon Franco is an aviator, an airman, in the days when they were the sort of astronauts and sort of global heroes of the time.
He flew the first transatlantic flight from Spain to Latin America, a flight that was followed daily by the New York Times.
To give you an idea,
And so he was very much a public figure, much more famous than his brother, than Francisco to begin with, and a far wilder and wackier and much more left-leaning figure.
He was the sort of family rebel and Francisco was the family sort of uptight conservative part.
You've spoken about his naval background, the fact that his father was in the navy.
He grew up in a naval port.
What drove Franco to join the army?
Well, he joined the army simply because the navy wasn't open for recruiting officers at the time, which in itself was part of the hangover from the disaster.
Spain didn't have the money to keep the same kind of navy it had had before.
And he wanted a military career in his family.
Everybody had always been in the navy, but going back centuries his father, his grandfathers, on both sides.
And so almost by accident, he ends up at the Infantry Academy in Toledo as a very young teenager.
And that's where his march towards what ultimately is a brilliant military career begins.
A formative part of his life was spent fighting in Morocco.
But for listeners who might not know much about that period, what was going on and why was it so decisive?
Well, it was immensely decisive in Franco's own career, but also in his own understanding of himself.
He himself says it, you know, I cannot explain myself to myself. without thinking about Africa.
To him, Africa is Morocco specifically.
It's the Spanish protectorate in the north of Africa.
This was part of an early 20th century carve-up of influence over Morocco, basically between the French and the Spaniards, and where Spain was given the very difficult task of basically conquering the Rift.
That's the mountainous area right on the north coast of morocco, basically looking across the straits of gibraltar.
If you want to think about the western end at spain, it's the coastline that looks at spain.
Nominally, they were doing this, you know, in the name of the moroccan monarchy, which hadn't actually asked anyone to come and help it deal with notoriously difficult rift region, And the Spaniards spent a lot of time, a lot of money and shed a lot of blood trying to basically conquer an area of land of very little value to anybody barren but which, in this sort of race for empire of the early 20th century, was more about national prestige than anything else.
It was about turning back the clock, if you want, or trying to refine that empire that had been lost and kickstart a new empire.
And that is where a very young Francisco Franco, as a teenage officer, turns up and his military career starts there.
It's very important because that was the one place where a young officer could escape the rigid structure of climbing up the ranks, which was normal in Spain, which basically depended on how many years you'd done.
And by valour on the battlefield, by bravery, could be promoted very quickly.
And that is exactly what a very ambitious young Francisco Franco wanted.
And that's exactly what he got.
And of course, he famously became the youngest general in Europe since Napoleon Bonaparte.
Was that through brilliance, luck or political navigating or something else entirely, do you think?
Well, it was a combination of those three things.
So he was lucky in the sense that almost 50% of young officers died in that war.
It was very much a sort of gung-ho, lead from the front affair.
And the officers were the first to be killed as a result of that.
He was badly wounded once.
But he made sure that as much as possible he was in the front line or his unit was in the front line.
And that meant that there were many opportunities for him to request promotions after a specific battle.
There were even a bizarre set of rules about how many of your men had died, depending on whether it was a retreat or an attack or whatever.
What percentage of your men had died meant you could get X medal or Y medal.
But basically he combined these two things the opportunity to climb the ranks that came from actually being in action, and then this immense ambition to take advantage of every single opportunity that came his way, not only while on the battlefield but afterwards, while lobbying very hard for every single promotion and every single medal he could get.
In 1931, Spain became a republic, and just over five years later, in the summer of 1936, the defining moment of Franco's life arrived when he participated in the coup that plunged Spain into civil war.
Firstly, what compelled him to join that conspiracy and where was he during that fateful summer?
Well, during that fateful summer, he was in the Canary Islands.
That's about as far away from mainland Spain as you can get off the Atlantic coast of Morocco.
But they are Spanish territory and they were Spanish territory.
He had been sent there deliberately by the left-wing Republican government, which suspected him that he might be involved in a coup one day and wanted him as far away as possible.
He joined the coup because he disliked intensely the left-wing government that was elected in 1936.
Specifically, he disliked its anti-clerical nature.
He disliked the socialist party movement. that backed the government.
It wasn't actually in government, but its votes were necessary for that government to exist.
And also he was very much in demand by the people who organized the coup.
He didn't organize it, but he was the best known general in Spain.
They wanted him for the coup.
He wasn't going to lead it.
He wasn't going to be the leader of their government if they won.
But he was a very important figure.
If he was in the coup, then a large part of the army would join it.
Very specifically the group known as the Africanistas, who were the other military officers who had made their careers in the north of Africa and who saw themselves as a sort of bunch of sort of exemplary, almost superior people who, because they were prepared to give their lives for Spain or for the honour of Spain, had the right to impose themselves and had the right to dictate what should happen.
And during the Civil War itself, Franco soon emerged as the de facto leader of the military rebels.
But he had to unite very different factions on Spain's political right into a single cause.
How did he do that?
And how central was terror to the way he consolidated his authority?
Well, first of all, what Franco does is rather brilliantly during the Spanish Civil War, which is after the coup, which fails in the sense that, you know, normally a coup would succeed within a week or two or within a day or two.
In this case, it basically sparks a war.
And that war is the Spanish Civil War, which then lasts for three years, all the way from 1936 to 1917.
He's sort of fortunate, in the sense that the chosen leader of the insurrectionist side will die almost immediately in an aeroplane accident.
That's General Sanjurjo reputedly, because he insisted on carrying all these heavy medals in this tiny little plane and it couldn't cope with the weight.
But Franco.
Then, very brilliantly, and this is really important in the space of just two weeks, he manages to to get the other generals to accept him first as generalissimo, which means you know, the commander in chief of them all, then as gaudillo, which means having all the civilian and political power, and then accepting that that is indefinite in time, that it could last for the rest of his lifetime.
And all this happens in the space of a couple of weeks.
And basically he's taking advantage of the fact that there is a war, it has to be won And everybody's prepared to back him for that moment.
The diverse factions which had backed the coup and then basically he bangs their heads together.
They're very diverse.
There are fascists who are sort of modern forward looking group.
There are card lists who are reactionary Roman Catholics with a vision of Spain that comes almost from the 15th century.
And he actually forces them together into a single outfit called the movement.
Their own leaders are scandalized, but they also discover that Franco will brook no argument and they are actually expelled or imprisoned and punished.
And so even his own side suddenly wakes up to the fact.
This is a man you can't mess with in that sense.
Then, more importantly, the other side will also discover this very quickly.
Basically, the war becomes a long, slow war.
And as he advances across Spain, the repression after each advance is brutal, because his aim is to purify Spain, is to purge all oppositions.
And it's one of the reasons he wants a slow war so that he's got time to do that as he progresses.
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The core ideas of Francoism, which I'd say is not actually a political ideology.
Francoism, for me, is a system of societal control and it's based on an almost military concept of politics, where there's a leader and everyone else must obey and anyone who doesn't obey is punished.
It's very simple in that sense.
And indeed, Franco himself is not a great thinker.
He's not a great political thinker in any way at all.
But he is always iron in his attitude towards obedience and discipline.
This is something he had imposed brutally on his own troops in Morocco.
And he would then go on and impose it brutally as well on Spaniards, especially in the early years during the war, while he's advancing, but also after the war, when he has another 20000 people shot.
And that's a kind of early investment in terror which will then pay back over decades in terms of fear and having a very tame population.
The idea of opposition is important, in fact, not just on the Francoist side in this case.
I often say that the Spanish Civil War is a war between anti-fascists and anti-communists, in a country where there were barely any communists and barely any fascists, which there weren't just before the war started.
Things very quickly happened differently.
People joined the Falange, which was the Spanish fascist party, and people joined the Communist Party also, but as a result of the war.
And so basically, he would say foreign ideas.
And foreign ideas to him were the things that had poisoned Spanish history since the beginning of the 19th century.
They're what had brought down the Spanish Empire.
And they were the things that came partly out of the Enlightenment but certainly out of the French Revolution.
Their ideas, like liberalism and socialism and perhaps rather more bizarrely, his sort of particular bugbear which is Freemasonry.
Do you want to go into why he had a particular bugbear about Freemasonry?
Because I think it is quite a fascinating thing about him.
And am I right in saying it's to do with his father being a Freemason?
Well, it's certainly to do with his father being close to the Freemasons and supporting them, but also, in fairness, to do with a very close relationship between liberals and Freemasons in 19th century Spain, but also because he, by nature, is very paranoid and sees conspiracies everywhere.
And a nice sort of secretive group like the Freemasons are perfect to pin a whole load of things on.
And that sort of paranoia, that ability to imagine conspiracies against him personally or against Spain as a whole, colours his entire dictatorship.
His relationships with Hitler and Mussolini and then later with the Western Allies are fascinating.
How did Franco navigate those shifting alliances?
Was there a coherent strategy or was he simply exceptionally good at political survival?
Well, Franco was an extremely cautious player.
He only joined, for example, the insurrection, the coup, at the very last moment, when he knew that it was definitely going to happen and looked likely to be successful.
He was very careful about himself.
He almost always tried to leave a door open to exit through rapidly if things didn't work out the way he wanted.
And this is what happened.
During the Second World War, he basically supported Mussolini and Hitler.
He did deals with them.
There were signed agreements that Spain would join the war on the Axis side.
But when Spain was ready.
And that's the key phrase, because if it's when Spain is ready, that means when Franco is ready.
And as Franco was ultra cautious.
And also frankly, Spain had very little to offer because it was completely burnt out by its own civil war.
So its army, you know, compared to the German army or the Italian army was fairly puny.
So basically, Franco held back.
And then the shape of the war changed and he could see that he was backing the losing side.
And the more loserish that losing side became, the less inclined he was to join.
And by the end he would claim that he had brilliantly avoided Spain's entry into world war ii.
In fact, what he'd wanted from hitler was a deal where he would join spain, would get gibraltar and french moroccos, the start of a new empire.
He again wanted to kick-start a new spanish empire which, of course, with him as dictator, would have made him an emperor as well.
But that never happened.
And having emerged as the victor of the Spanish Civil War, what were Franco's priorities in Spain after 1939, in the immediacy of the aftermath of the Civil War?
Because Franco was xenophobic, blamed Spain's fall from glory on foreigners and foreign ideas.
He believed that the solution was for Spain to become more Spanish, more purely Spanish.
That meant a couple of things.
That meant, first of all, embracing the Roman Catholic Church very closely as a source of Spanish identity, which the Roman Catholic Church was very happy to offer itself up for that.
And in fact, you know, pronounced his insurrection as a crusade against an anti-clerical left.
But it also meant that he thought Spain was didn't need foreign imports, didn't need much foreign trade, that Spain on its own should seek self-reliance and a policy of autarky.
And that policy of autarky was entirely disastrous for Spain in 1940 and 1945.
In the winters of both those years, there were famines in Spain.
Spain simply didn't have enough to eat, and that had a lot to do with his decision to basically slam the door shut and try and resolve Spain's problems entirely on its own.
I wonder Giles, if you could tell me a little bit about the origins of the monument that becomes known as the Valley of the Fallen and what was involved in the making of that project, what it was designed to be essentially.
Well, the Valley of the Fallen is Franco's personal project for memorial to the Spanish Civil War, nominally to all the dead, but actually, in all his speeches, to his own glorious victory.
It's a remarkable place.
It's still there.
People can go and visit it.
It's an underground basilica.
It's the size of St.
Peter's in the Vatican, with a huge domed ceiling buried inside a mountain, basically.
And this was a very personal project.
He was fascinated by it.
It took, I think, a decade. to tunnel out and to finish.
And it was also where eventually, he decided he would be buried where the head of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, where he would be buried.
He had been shot by the other side during the Spanish Civil War.
And also some 35000 bodies from the Civil War itself which were dug up and transported to to this place.
It's just outside Madrid, which is where I am right now.
That's where I live and have lived for a very long time.
And I mean it's a very remarkable place, but it's also become very controversial obviously, over the years.
But for Franco, it was a very dear and important spot.
He himself was convinced it was a sort of symbol of reconciliation, and some of his followers were as well.
But again, if you listen to the speeches he made whenever he went there, damning the international brigades, for example, and the other side, and damning socialism and communism and everything that had gone wrong with Spain, then you saw very quickly that actually it's a monument to victory.
There's a movement under the current socialist government to do what they call, to re-signify The Valley of the Fallen which, in fact, the first step has been to stop calling it the Valley of the Fallen and go back to its old geographical name, which is Coelgamudos was the name of the of the valley, and try to retell the story, try to allow the families of those whose bodies were taken there without permission from the families, allow them to recover those bodies.
There are even attempts to remove the Dominican Order, who have a monastery on the site as well.
And it's an attempt to sort of depoliticize, if you want, what is actually an enormously political movement.
And you know, if you've been there, you know it's a sort of strange and spooky but awe-inspiring monument.
In that sense, it was quite cleverly designed because it does provoke awe.
You know, as you step in from the mountainside and you're suddenly inside what feels like a cathedral, a troglodyte cathedral buried under the rocks.
You know, my personal opinion, which I've shared widely and nobody's ever paid attention to, is that the Valley of the Fallen should become the civil war museum that Spain has never had.
Franco also had to contend with separatist movements in the Basque country and Catalonia, notably a domestic terrorist campaign in respect of the former.
How did he approach those challenges?
So the first thing he did, because those challenges were around before his coup.
And, in fact, one of the reasons given for his coup was that there was a growing nationalist movement in Catalonia.
There was a growing nationalist movement in the Basque country.
And indeed there was actually before the civil war, there was also a growing nationalist movement in Galicia, which was his home region.
So these were one of the reasons given especially by these Afrikanistas, these hardcore military men who thought that their job was not just to defend Spain from exterior threat, but to defend it from interior threats.
And so the reasoning was well, you know, these nationalists want to break up the country, and we have to defend it.
And so the logic was you know well, we have to suppress nationalist movements, and that's exactly right.
What he did as soon as he came into power.
You know he sat very heavily on the separate languages of Spain Catalan and Euskera, which is the Basque language you know could not be used in any official sense under Franco.
They weren't entirely repressed.
People still spoke their languages at home because that was their language.
But essentially the idea was that Spain was one with one language and that these were sort of slightly exotic extras that were destined to disappear over time and certainly shouldn't be encouraged.
Spain experienced huge economic shifts under Franco, from inward-looking autarchy to technocratic modernisation.
Was that pivot something he envisioned or was it effectively forced upon him?
That pivot was forced upon him.
First of all, because he had done agreements with the United States, he'd become a Cold War winner.
So if, after the Second World War, Spain became a kind of pariah state as the last right-wing dictatorship well, by the early to mid-1950s, as the Cold War began was getting underway.
The Americans looked around for anti-communists and there was Francisco Franco who very happily said well, welcome.
I've been saying this all along.
I'm glad you've realized that I'm always right.
That also meant that the Americans were there to support Spain economically when things went wrong, which they did, but under certain conditions.
And so there was a first sort of semi-opening of the Spanish economy in the 1950s, And then again early in the 60s when things went seriously wrong and there was basically what today we would consider a classic international monetary fund rescue.
But with all the conditions which a classic international monetary fund rescue sort of brings, which in this case was opening up the Spanish economy, this incredible economic boom that did then happen in the 1960s.
Spain became a kind of tiger economy.
If we want to think in sort of today's terms, it was the sort of Vietnam or the China of its day.
But this was also part of a southern European boom that was already underway.
Italy was already growing hugely.
Portugal as well.
Those are the two countries to the west and the east of Spain.
And so in many ways Spain just sort of joined rather late something that was already happening and that it would have got there earlier if Franco hadn't been so interested in autarky.
But it does mean that the reality of Spanish people's lives in the 1960s was that they were sort of sitting on a growth rocket.
And that changed people's lives enormously.
And people became very grateful for that.
And they were their sensation in the 1960s often was, you know, aren't we doing well?
And, as they were told by the state-controlled press, this was all due to this rather brilliant man, Francisco Franco.
Well, it also helped create an atmosphere of support which also you know, a man who had been controlling the press for 20, 30 years, had controlled the education system, the schools and the universities you know had produced entire generations of young Spaniards, you know meant that there was absolutely a degree of popularity which we then can't manage because it's a dictatorship.
So there are no free and fair elections.
There were a couple of referendums which then produced the kind of what would later be known as Bulgarian style results, you know 95 in favour of which you know are entirely untrustworthy, but nevertheless do actually speak to a certain sort of support and also to a degree of conformity where you didn't really have much option.
So you went along with them.
And by the 1960s he was an elderly dictator, a relic of the interval period in a rapidly changing Europe.
What was he doing behind the scenes to make sure his regime would outlive him?
For a long time he was very careful to make sure that nobody near him could look like a rival or replacement or a successor.
He didn't want anyone challenging him for power.
Eventually, he decided that he would handpick a successor.
And that successor, chosen in the 1960s, was Trump. the heir to the Spanish crown.
Spain had become a republic in 1931, five years before Franco took before the Civil War.
So this was a restoration of the monarchy.
Franco himself had behaved as if he was the monarch, but this was actually a restoration of a monarchy that had been out of power since the 1930s and basically being kicked out by Spaniards in 1931, which was when There were some municipal elections which showed such a massive anti-monarchical majority that basically the monarch of the time, who was Prince Juan Carlos, as he was then his grandfather just left.
But Prince Juan Carlos was then sent to be brought up in Spain as a teenager, his education overseen by Franco.
And over the years he sort of sat in Franco's Almost in his shadow.
He's often in the background of photographs of Franco.
And indeed, when Franco died in 1975, the powers of a dictator were passed to a prince, who became a king.
Looking at those final years of Franco and his regime, what do they look like?
Two things are happening in the final years.
One, we have the economic boom, which is changing things rapidly.
Spain has opened up.
It also means that the whole tourism industry is kicking off.
There's also mass emigration of Spaniards into northern Europe to go and find relatively well-paid jobs in factories and factories.
France and Germany and Belgium and elsewhere.
So Spain is receiving this influence, this influx of sort of European culture.
And people are beginning to realize, actually, there might be something better out there.
They're being told that by the people who are sending money back or coming back for their holidays, they're seeing the freedom and wealth of the tourists who are arriving.
And that helps create an atmosphere in which there begins to be a rebellion against Francoism.
It's not hugely overt or disruptive, but it's there.
And amongst other things, we begin to see The first anti-Francoist armed groups appear.
One of them is ETA, the Basque Liberation Movement, which then will become a recognized terrorist movement.
When we go into democracy, it won't go away.
There are a few other sort of leftist groups that start practicing using violence.
And students and workers, strikes, things begin to happen.
And Franco begins to feel that maybe he's losing control, or rather that system, which is the most important thing to him of having an obedient nation under his control, is beginning to slip away.
And he goes back to repression.
And so we start to have states of exception or states of emergency.
Basically the suspension of all individual rights.
We begin to have firing squads working again.
Even the garot, which was this ghastly sort of medieval style Spanish execution method, which basically means sort of tying a metal band around someone's throat and around a pole behind them and then tightening it until they die.
Even that was still being used in the 1970s.
So there was this idea that things were beginning to get hot.
There were demonstrations.
Even the Roman Catholic Church itself had changed because of Vatican II.
The Roman Catholic Church, which Franco had decided was part of Spanish identity, suddenly was liberal.
And that was an enormous shock to Franco and to his regime and allowed another form of opposition to to appear which you know mentally for him, I think, was very difficult to deal with because it was the church.
You know, there were priests were being sent to prison.
Liberation theology was around.
There were red priests, there were worker priests who went to work in factories because they thought that was where they should be.
And so there was a combination of all these things.
And then we have Etta, who in the early 70s managed to assassinate Franco's prime minister, Admiral Carrero Blanco, had been his sort of right-hand man for more than 20 years.
And that was a very significant moment, because the first moment where people went ah OK, here something very different could happen.
And these people perhaps aren't as much in control as we thought.
Can you tell me about the moment Franco died and what that particular moment meant for Spaniards?
So Franco dies on possibly the 20th of November 1975.
I say possibly because you know the official time of death is 525 in the morning, but already journalists were reporting him dead an hour earlier.
The doctors who were involved.
Some of them say he was dead by 2 o'clock and the doctor who had to deal with the body said he was there by 1 o'clock and it was already cold.
So it's possible that he actually died the previous day.
So there was a sort of convenient lie told partly so that he could die on the same date as José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who also died on the 20th of November.
But anyway, it was a very traumatic moment for Spaniards.
Everybody had been waiting for it.
There'd been this sort of saga of Franco dying very, very slowly, with sort of almost daily bulletins on his state of health as he lay in a hospital bed in Madrid.
So everybody knew it was coming.
But at the same time, this had been a personal dictatorship and it had been there for almost four decades.
And so there was a lot of fear about what might happen afterwards.
And Frank had been very successful in this aim of making Spaniards conform, of inducing a form of political apathy, of even persuading Spaniards that they weren't capable of governing themselves, which was one of his messages.
And so it's fair to say that people were very worried about what would happen next.
A lot of people were sad because that was all they knew.
There was just a big question mark about what was going to happen now.
Everything suddenly It's going to change for some people.
If you were 45 or below, you had no memory of anything other than Francoism.
So your world was about to change.
And of course, the world changed quite dramatically.
Spain then transitioned to democracy within a couple of years of Franco's death.
And it's now been 50 years since that miraculous moment as it's been described.
How do you think Spaniards have confronted the man since 1975?
Since 1975, Spaniards have done their best not to confront the man who dominated their country for so long.
Part of that very rapid and very successful transition to democracy.
Part of the deal was let's not talk about the war or let's not talk about Francoism itself.
And that was partly because it was the Francoists themselves who oversaw the transition.
King Juan Carlos was a Franco appointee.
His most important prime minister during that transition period was also an old Francoist official.
The army was in the background prepared, everybody assumed, to rise again if things went the way they didn't like.
Many of them didn't like even the idea of democracy.
So it was very fraught.
And one of the agreements was that, A, we wouldn't talk about the past.
B, there would be no reckoning, no demand for justice, no desire to go after Franco's henchmen.
So there was an amnesty that covered that.
And the attitude was, you know, let's look forward and let's not look back.
In my opinion that was probably valuable enough in the first few years, maybe the first five, perhaps even the first 10.
But a kind of inertia set in.
And it meant it wasn't something, for example, that was taught at schools.
So this book, which came out, actually came out in Spanish six months before it came out in English.
So I've been promoting it around Spain for the last six months.
And I've been finding university students coming up to me and saying Listen, at high school they didn't teach us about this.
I personally thought that had changed, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago.
I knew that it was on the curriculum, but for some reason the teachers managed not to get there, if you know what I mean.
It was sort of the last phase and they didn't quite make it.
And I was very surprised and quite shocked to see that that still happens, certainly in some places in Spain.
And so there's a very broad ignorance there. about Franco, about where he came from.
So the idea that Franco is in a way a product of Spanish history, that idea is not out there as a way of understanding him.
And he's a very sort of two-dimensional figure for everyone.
You either hate him or, in some cases, support him.
And the polls at the moment show that one in five Spaniards, including one in five young Spaniards, think that he was good for Spain.
I've lived here a long time.
20 years ago, I used to go to the Valley of the Fallen on the 20th of November just to go and see what was happening there.
And what was happening there was basically a sort of fascist rally where this church this basilica would have a memorial mass and that would turn into a Francoists sing-along with you know chants of the old songs and then all the fascists from Europe would turn up and everybody would be giving their stiff-armed salutes and that was able to happen because even though The Valley of the Fallen was state-owned.
Even socialist governments had decided just to ignore everything.
And that included ignoring the past, not talking about the Civil War, not talking about Franco.
That began to change about 20 years ago, basically because volunteers started finding the mass graves left behind by the Francoist side during the Civil War, digging up the dead.
And that sort of finally pushed the Socialist Party, when it got back into power, into passing what was then known as a historical memory law, which actually was quite timid.
But, you know, Elise said, we can dig up the graves.
We can talk about this.
Maybe we should remove some street names and some monuments, and but nothing on the style of a sort of German national debate about the Nazis.
Nothing like that.
This had never been supported by the right-wing governments in Spain.
One of the problems is that the main right-wing party was founded by a Francoist minister in the first place.
But also the right would argue that the left uses the past as a sort of stick to beat the right with as a political tool.
We're now back with a socialist government and there's been another historical memory law.
This time it's called the democratic memory law, which is basically an attempt to persuade everyone that Francoism was bad and that really, you know, there is nothing to celebrate about a dictatorship which removes everybody's rights and is based on a bloody civil war and an insurrection against an elected government.
But that argument doesn't always work.
And also it's become very sort of two-dimensional, in the sense that if you say yes, I'll say no, and we won't really have to go much further in the historical debate about what happened and why.
So it becomes a sort of you know a political punch-up with very little content from the sort of historical point of view.
One of the sort of hotspots of this historical memory debate was what should we do with Franka's corpse?
Franka was buried in the Valley of the Fallen, but in 2019 it was decided that he should be removed.
That again provoked an outpouring of concern that this was going to stir things up again and open the Pandora's box of Spanish civil war attitudes and that somehow we'd suddenly be back, you know, in a ghastly bloodbath of some kind.
In fact, absolutely nothing happened.
300 people turned up to pray and his body was removed and taken to the family pantheon in a different graveyard and he was reburied.
And the reaction to that, to me, was proof that this is something that Spaniards can talk about, that they shouldn't be as scared of the subject as they are.
But also, kind of symbolically, an expression of the potency of Franco's dictatorship, so many years later that people are still scared of talking about it.
Obviously, they weren't allowed to talk about it freely at the time.
And so there's an element of fear which is part of that, along with the pact of silence of the transition, which was itself based on a degree of fear.
So that's very interesting.
But if we think about it, it's not surprising, is it?
It's 40 years of dictatorship in a Western European country in the 20th century.
It's the most important figure in Spanish history. in two centuries.
And perhaps more surprising is the idea that Spaniards have been able to, in a way, turn their back on it, but perhaps also that they seem inclined not to want to know too much more about it, as if it's a sort of national embarrassment.
That was Giles Tremlett speaking to Danny Bird.
Giles is a prize-winning biographer, narrative historian and journalist based in Madrid, Spain.
His new book, El Generalissimo, Franco, Power, Violence, and the Quest for Greatness is out now.
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