Francisco Franco

Franco quickly joined the army and took part in the Rif War between 1912 and 1916, as well as in the suppression of the violent strikes in Asturias during the summer of 1917. When Spain proclaimed itself a republic in 1931, Franco was appointed military governor and then commander-in-chief of the Balearic Islands, and once again intervened against the uprising in Asturias. In 1935, he became Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, but the “Frente Popular” (Spanish Popular Front), newly elected in 1936, sent him on a mission to the Canary Islands. General Franco founded the “Spanish Traditionalist Falange” and the “National-Syndicalist Offensive Committees.” In doing so, he sought to unify all the parties that had supported him during the Spanish Civil War (the Spanish Falange, Carlists, and Traditionalists) and form a single national party in Spain. He organized the rebellion that would lead to the Spanish Civil War. Although he was supported, on the eve of World War II, by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, Franco also benefited from the non-interventionist stances of France and England. In 1939, the man who now called himself the “Caudillo”—in memory of the Spanish knights who drove the Arabs out of Spain in the Middle Ages—marched on Barcelona and then Madrid, overthrowing the existing regime. He established a totalitarian dictatorship, the Franco regime, which lasted until 1975—a period that was detrimental to Spain’s economic development.

Upon his death in November 1975, Juan Carlos I ascended to the Spanish throne and reestablished a democratic system open to the outside world under a constitutional monarchy.