Paul Preston - Franco

Partly because a naval commission was a common ambition among the Ferrolano middle class and because of his father’s job, Francisco developed an interest in things of the sea. As a child he played pirates in the harbour with the gangplanks of the ferries and rowed in the tranquil waters of the virtually enclosed ría (firth or fjord) of El Ferrol. 3 As an adolescent, he tried to join the Navy. His two primary schools, the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón and the Colegio de la Marina, both specialised in preparing children for the Navy entrance examinations. 4 Nicolás Franco Bahamonde did manage to fulfil his father’s expectations, but Francisco’s naval ambitions were to be thwarted. His failure to enter the navy would weigh heavily on him. In Salamanca during the Civil War, it was common knowledge that to please him or deflect his anger it was always worth trying to change the subject to naval matters. 5 As Caudillo, he spent as much time as he could aboard his yacht Azor , wore an admiral’s uniform at every opportunity and, when visiting coastal cities, liked to arrive from the sea on board a warship.

His childhood was dominated by the efforts of his mother to cope with the overbearing severity and later the constant absences of his father, the shadow of whose infidelities hung over the home. He was brought up by Doña Pilar in an atmosphere of piety and stifling provincial lower middle class gentility. Marriage had only briefly diminished the number and length of Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo’s card games and drinking sessions at the officers’ club. After the birth of his daughter Paz, in 1898, Nicolás had returned to his bachelor habits. The distress that this caused his wife was compounded by the death of Paz in 1903, after an undiagnosed illness lasting four months. Pilar Bahamonde was devastated. 6 Nicolás Franco was, at home, a bad-tempered authoritarian who easily lost control of himself if contradicted. His daughter Pilar described him as running the house like a general, although she also claimed that he beat his sons no more than was the norm at the time, a double-edged claim which leaves it difficult to evaluate the scale and intensity of his violence. The young Nicolás bore the brunt of his anger and Ramón also carried a deep resentment of his father and his uncontrolled violence all through his life. Until Nicolás Franco left home in 1907, his children and his wife were often the victims of his frequent rages.

Francisco was too well-behaved, too much of a ‘little old man’ ( niño mayor ), in his sister’s phrase, to arouse his father’s anger with any frequency. Nevertheless, Pilar recounts the deep sulk that came over him whenever he was cuffed unjustly by his father. 7 Unable to win his father’s acceptance and affection, Francisco seems to have turned in on himself. He was a lonely child, withdrawn to the point of icy detachment. A story is told that when he was aged about eight, Pilar heated a long needle until the tip was red-hot and pressed it onto his wrist. Allegedly, gritting his teeth as his flesh burnt, he said only ‘how shocking the way burnt flesh smells’. 8 Within the family, Francisco was long overshadowed by his two brothers, Nicolás and Ramón, who were extroverts and took after their father. Nicolás, who became a naval engineer, was the father’s favourite. Interviewed in the press in 1926, Franco père dismissed as unremarkable the achievements of his two younger sons, Francisco as commander of the Foreign Legion and Ramón who had become the first man to fly the south Atlantic. 9 Even in later life, when Francisco was Head of State, his father, when asked about ‘his son’, would perversely talk about Nicolás or sometimes Ramón. Only when pressed would Don Nicolás talk about the person he called ‘my other son’.

In total contrast to her despotic husband, Pilar Bahamonde was a gentle, kindly and serene woman. She responded to the humiliations suffered at the hands of the gambling and philandering Nicolás by presenting to the world a facade of quiet dignity and religious piety that hid her shame and the economic difficulties she had to face. That is not to say that the family suffered privations, since she received financial help from her father, Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, who lived with her after the death of his wife, and also from her husband. Nevertheless, once her husband established residence in Madrid from 1907, what Pilar Bahamonde received from him must necessarily have been limited. There was always a maid in the house, but some sacrifices were required to keep up appearances. Sending all four children to private schools put a strain on the family economy. It has been suggested, although strenuously denied by the family, that she had to take in lodgers. 10 Despite these difficulties, her kindness extended to her relations and she helped to bring up the seven younger children of her brother-in-law Hermenegildo Franco. 11

Pilar Bahamonde tried to imbue her children with a determination to get on in life and to escape from their situation by study and hard work, a philosophy which seems to have taken root principally with her second son and her daughter Pilar. Nevertheless, all four of her surviving children were to be fearless and powerfully ambitious in one way or another. Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo was a liberal, sympathetic to freemasonry and critical of the Catholic Church. In contrast, Pilar Bahamonde was politically conservative and a deeply pious Catholic. Given the circumstances of his childhood, and the nature and ideas of his father, it is hardly surprising that an enduring and unsubtle Catholicism, sexual prurience and a hatred for liberalism and freemasonry should be part of the legacy which the young Franco was left by his mother. 12 What is more intriguing is the fact that his brothers followed in the footsteps of Don Nicolás rather than those of Doña Pilar. After her husband left, Doña Pilar always wore black. It seems too that, as Francisco witnessed her introspective piety becoming an effective shield against her misfortunes, he suppressed his own emotional vulnerability at the cost of developing a cold inner emptiness.

Doña Pilar’s unhappiness and stoical attempts to put a good face on her plight made it difficult for her to compensate her children for the behaviour of her husband. Each responded differently: Francisco identified with his mother, denying the need for his father’s approval which he longed for and never achieved. His hedonistic elder brother Nicolás grew up to be as pleasure-loving as his father, free with money and with women. His wild younger brother Ramón would be an irresponsible adventurer, famous for his exploits as an air-ace and notorious for his decadent private life in the 1920s and for a superficial involvement with both anarchism and freemasonry. Francisco was much more deeply attached to his mother than were either of his brothers. He regularly accompanied her to communion and was a pious child. He cried when he made his first communion. When on leave in El Ferrol, the adult Francisco would never fail to fulfil any religious duty for fear of upsetting his mother. * 13

It is impossible to say with any precision what effect the separation of his parents and the departure of his father had on Francisco, although there is surely some significance in the fact that one of the few remarks that he ever made on the subject of children was: ‘small children should never be separated from their parents. It is not good to let that happen. The child needs to have the security provided by the support of his parents and they should not forget that their children are their personal responsibility.’ 14 As Caudillo, Franco denied vehemently that there was anything abnormal in Don Nicolás’s relationship with his wife or his children. On one occasion, however, when given irrefutable evidence of his father’s pecadillos, his reaction was revealing. He snapped ‘Alright but they never diminished his paternal authority’. 15 The difficulties of Franco’s relationship with his father were later reflected in various efforts to reconstruct it in an idealised way. In his diary of his first year in the Spanish Foreign Legion, he told a clearly apocryphal story in which can be discerned his own longings. A young officer in Morocco is crossing the street when a grizzled veteran soldier salutes him. The officer goes to return the salute, their eyes meet, they look at each other and embrace in tears. It is the officer’s long-lost father. 16 It was a trial run for his autobiographical novel, Raza , in which he created the father he would rather have had as a naval hero of total moral rectitude. When his father died, he had the body seized and implicitly reinvented the second part of his life by having him buried with a pomp which, while in accord with military regulations, was hardly appropriate to the bohemianism of Don Nicolás’s final years. Franco’s own lifelong avoidance of drink, gambling and women bore testimony to a determination to create an existence which was the antithesis of his father’s life.