Francisco Franco was Spain's military dictator from 1936 until his death on November 20th 1975. He was short, uncharismatic and an uninspiring public speaker, yet proved a remarkably durable autocrat.
Franco was born into a family of naval administrators in the port of El Ferrol, in Galicia. His mother was conservative; his father was a libertine and a freemason—an estrangement that helped mould Franco's lifelong abhorrence of freemasonry and liberalism alongside his hatred of Marxism. He joined the Spanish army during its brutal colonial war in northern Morocco, where he was fearless, notoriously cold and indifferent to the human cost of war. He rose to become commander of the Spanish Legion, the army's boldest and cruellest unit.
When revolutionary miners staged an insurrection in Asturias in 1934, a conservative government turned to Franco to repress them. Two years later, when a group of generals plotted a coup against the left-wing Popular Front government, Franco hesitated and joined only at the last minute. Posted to the distant Canary Islands, he took charge of the powerful army in Spanish Morocco and secured the support of Hitler and Mussolini to airlift it to the mainland. With rivals dead, he installed himself as commander-in-chief and head of state of the Nationalist side in the Spanish civil war.
Many of the rebels had wanted to restore the monarchy; Franco erected a personal dictatorship instead. Despite his wartime alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, he was a fascist only when it suited him. He represented a previous tradition of reactionary Catholic nationalism, his worldview forged by Spain's humiliating loss of its colonial empire in the Spanish-American war of 1898 and then the Moroccan war.
Franco adapted to events, remaking himself as an American ally against communism in the cold war. His policy of autarky inflicted two decades of grinding poverty on Spain. He later turned to Catholic technocrats who liberalised the economy, unleashing decades of growth. He bequeathed to Spain's democracy a professional bureaucracy and a system of administrative law. He was described as "a giant dam" that held back democracy and necessary social and political change. Once he was dead, the country quickly made up for lost time.
Everyone complains of his memory, no one of his judgement.