Julián Casanova, historian: ‘The good things Franco did were done by democracies without torture or death sentences’

Julián Casanova (Zaragoza, 1956) says that history travels “down many streets and in many directions” and can only be understood through a “deep investigation” into the events of the past. In Franco, Casanova constructs a portrait of the Spanish dictator for the 21st century in 30 brief and very agile chapters, which he has completed with a photographic album that gives an account of the figures who surrounded him, a rigorous chronology and an extensive bibliographic commentary. There is something about Casanova, professor of contemporary history at the University of Zaragoza, that makes him a rara avis in his profession: the long periods of time that he has taught outside of Spain, in the United States but above all in Budapest and Vienna at the Central European University, and his eagerness to intervene in public discussion, whether on social networks or in traditional media. He has studied and written about anarchism, the Republic and the Civil War, but also about Europe, which was torn apart after the Great War, the Russian Revolution and the violence that has marked the 20th century. He says that “it is possible to explore the past without seeking a conviction or an absolution”: “You cannot put anyone in a courtroom because the goodness or evil of the characters is not a historical concept.” He comments on Francisco Franco that “he was not a charismatic character,” but that unlike others who were, he died in his bed and was afforded a pharaonic burial, “and we will have to explain why.”

Question: Where does Franco come from?

Answer. He was born in 1892 into a family from Galicia [in northwestern Spain] that had long been linked to the Navy at a time when Spain had lost its colonies and when belonging to the Navy no longer meant any glory. His father, who abandoned the family just as he joined the infantry, was never a reference in his life; his mother was his kindness. His upbringing was typical of what a son of a soldier would have had in Galicia at the turn of the 20th century, a mixture of military tradition and Catholicism. Nothing extraordinary would have happened if Franco had not passed through Africa.

Q. So Africa is one of the keys?

A. I realized that all the dictators of his time had been through World War I, and he hadn’t. And Africa was very similar to that experience for him. Franco has said that the Military Academy of Toledo, which he entered in 1907, made him a man, and his daughter has recalled that he suffered humiliation there. He arrived in Africa in 1912, after leaving the Academy with an unpromising record, and stayed there until 1926, which left an indelible mark on him.

Q. In what sense?

A. He understood that people were working their butts off for their country and that the politicians had abandoned them, and he began to invent a character who was sustained by heroism, by the idea of “I do everything for my country.” He rose very quickly on his war merits.

Q. He became a general at the age of 33.

A. The rapid promotion through battlefield achievements is important to understand the hatred he felt for [Prime Minister Manuel] Azaña when, in his military reform, he rejected this type of promotion. He also hated him for closing the General Military Academy, which was created by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and of which Franco was director. Here we enter the area of grievances. He accumulated them and he would release them throughout his life, and he could do so because he had a power that he had never dreamed of.

Q. At what point did he achieve that power?

A. Without the coup d’état, as it turned out, because he was not the main person involved. Without the civil war, as it broke out in October, when he was elected by his people as head of the Spanish government, Franco wouldn’t have been so important. Before 1936, he was just another war hero, the youngest divisional general in Europe.

Q. How important was it that he was the one who contacted Hitler at the beginning of the war?

A. Without being in Morocco, the letter he sent to Hitler would never have existed. He had access to some Germans there who allowed him to reach him. When his emissary arrived to see the Führer with the letter, he didn’t tell him that it was sent by Franco, but by a Spanish general who was in trouble after staging a coup against the revolution. And that is when Hitler showed interest. Paul Preston already explained it: the rise to the pinnacle of power of a nobody, more than anybody else involved, occurred because he knew how to play the internationalization card and managed to get troops through the Straits [of Gibraltar] and secure Hitler’s help. Two weeks after everything started, the Germans and Italians had already agreed that all weapons would go through Franco. Mola, Queipo de Llano and the others were ruled out. After the capture of the Alcázar [of Toledo], which made him famous, another Franco emerges.

Q. The political Franco?

A. In Zaragoza, at the Academy, with the many hospitalities he was the recipient of, he began to taste the honey of political power. Which, of course, has to be subordinated to military power. And he no longer thought of anything else.

Q. What did his victory mean?

A. That he didn’t have to prove anything. They wanted him because he won the war and freed Spain from the communists.

Q. What kind of regime and character did he construct during the war?

A. When he became the undisputed leader, he realized that the Nationalist soldiers had no plan. [Interior Minister Ramón] Serrano Suñer told him that he was governing a camp-like state and that he needed a modern state: Nazi, fascist, with a single party. Franco had to combine the military tradition he came from with the very important weight of Catholicism that supported him and with a new force, that of the Falange, which had not become a widely supported party. Franco was building his regime while he was at war.

Q. And what importance did that have?

A. It made him realize the importance of religion and rituals. It is not only propaganda that is useful, rituals are needed. And rituals are carried out around martyrs. This is what Gentile calls the political religion of fascism. Martyrs are beginning to appear everywhere, as are places of memory.

Q. After the end of World War II, Franco reinvented himself again.

A. Fascism and the Church: that combination for me is the key, and sharing the spoils, without forgetting the military who backed him. He knew that, no matter how much fascism and how much Church, without the military at his side nothing will last. They were the three great axes that would mark the history of Spain. When one of them had to disappear, with the defeat of fascism, Franco received a report from [right-hand man Luis] Carrero Blanco telling him that they were not going to be overthrown from outside, so what they had to do was to maintain order and hold on.

Q. What happened in the meantime inside Spain?

A. Franco spent six years cleaning up Spain and eliminated the internal enemy, who ended up either in the cemetery or in exile. In the post-war period, in the midst of hunger and repression, Franco managed to convince people that he had nothing to do with all this. And he also managed to convey that the monarchy that Don Juan [former king Carlos I] represented was the liberal monarchy that led Spain to a resounding failure, so he did well to cross the dynastic line. And to retain power.

Q. How did he do that?

Q. The dirtiest part of dictatorships is not carried out by the dictators. Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, invented a term that I apply to Franco: “At the direction of the Führer.” The Führer did not have to remind anyone what they had to do. And the same goes for Franco.

Q. They say that the 1950s were the golden age of tyranny.

A. I attach great importance to the Korean War. It was the turning point that allowed the Western powers to realize that the Soviet Union was an ally against fascism, but that at that moment it was the enemy. Franco understood this immediately. That change was key; the other is the American friend. He understood that Franco plus Salazar plus what happened in Greece were decisive in controlling the Mediterranean. The year 1953 was key: the concordat with the Vatican and the agreements with the United States were signed. He knew that no one was going to touch him and, from then on, he had a free hand, for corruption and for everything else.

Q. What happened when Opus Dei gained power in the late 1950s?

A. Opus Dei, from a Weberian approach, did in a country without Protestantism what the Protestant ethic produced: rationalize the administration and the state to modernize capitalism, and it did so without abandoning authoritarianism.

Q. And in the 1960s?

A. Succeeding in keeping up with the great changes that took place at that time is a huge achievement. In addition to resorting to repression, he let Opus Dei do its work and, in addition, there was a golden age of Falangism. That is, until the Matesa corruption scandal came to light in 1969, and a case of corruption affecting the Falange was exposed: the regime was split from above. All studies of dictatorships show that they only fall because of internal struggles between those in charge. I draw a clear conclusion from the dictatorship: all the characters surrounding Franco are male and have double standards. Among his 119 ministers, there was not a single woman, but neither were they relevant in their personal lives: on hunts they sat somewhere else, they did not eat with the men. It was a barracks mentality, but one passed through Africa. There was misogyny in the way of governing, in the laws, in the contempt for and subordination of women.

Q. And the opposition?

A. Before the appearance of the Workers’ Commissions, the opposition was in the catacombs. The classic trade unionism of the UGT and the CNT and the political parties was dismantled, they were terribly afraid. What was emerging was a new mentality that was no longer going to fight to oust Franco and start the revolution. Santos Juliá understood this, Javier Pradera understood it. The people coming through were left-wing people, but they were no longer fighting to conquer the Bastille. With a united army, that could not be done. The real opposition was in the neighborhood associations, in the worker priests who for the first time spoke of socialism, in the Workers’ Commissions, and in a dozen small Maoist revolutionary groups that still believed that something could be done. But it was clear that it was not going to be possible.

Q. People defend Franco by saying that he was a modernizer.

A. The fact that there are those on the far-right today who want to revive someone who most people already know did no good for the history of Spain allows me to believe that a biography like this can serve to make people think. To make them think, not to indoctrinate. The great peculiarity of our history is that during the three decades in which democracy and the social state of law were consolidated in Western Europe, Spain was outside of that. If Franco had died in 1945, today he would be remembered as a fascist.

Q. How long did the repression continue?

A. Until the end. The Public Order Tribunal, the TOP, was created in 1963 and dissolved in January 1977. All the good things that Franco did were done by Western democracies without the need for torture, prison, exclusion policies, or death sentences. If democracy cannot explain these things, that is another problem: history does.

Q. Your biography of Franco appears in the context of a bitter controversy over the events planned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his death.

A. I think that 50 years after the death of a person who was in power for 40 years and who marked the life of Spain is a good time to explain many things to citizens. The date deserves commemoration, and for people to be able to know what Franco’s dictatorship was. A democratic government, whether socialist or not, should not be under any doubt about this in 2025. We have a peculiarity, and it is not in [Prime Minister Pedro] Sánchez, but in a [opposition conservative] Popular Party that will never participate in this, in a right that has never known how to freely address a past that also belonged to the right of other European countries. One could look at Adenauer, at Christian democracy, to understand that at this point anything that is fascism or authoritarianism is not worth it.

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