Franco sought constantly to reinvent his persona, adapting his self-image to the prevailing winds of national and international circumstance. Even at the height of war in Europe, with Spain racked by starvation, Franco found time in late 1940 to write a work of fiction based on his own family history and entitled, significantly, Raza. In it, he set out a romanticized vision of his background, in which humble origins are replaced by the status of minor aristocracy and the hero's father, in contrast to his own, was a naval officer killed on active duty. This need to reconstruct his past reflected a deeply unhappy relationship with an authoritarian, dissolute, and philandering father who was dismissively contemptuous of him. In compensation, Franco developed extremely close ties to his mother Pilar, from whom he inherited a lifelong capacity for serenity in the face of turmoil.
A series of contradictions characterized the Caudillo. Franco was deeply cunning, yet remarkably credulous; cruel and impassive, yet easily moved to tears; duplicitous, yet naive; pompous and self-aggrandizing, yet timid. Ultimately, his world-view was simple, shaped by his experiences as a soldier in Africa defending Spain's beleaguered colonial remnants. From these early experiences developed an enduring distrust of politicians. He came to regard parliamentary democracy as synonymous with free-masonry, to which—alongside Communism—he was obsessionally opposed. The constants in his political outlook were order, hierarchy, and discipline, supported through an instrumental attachment to the Catholic church. Lacking the messianic vision which drove Hitler and Mussolini, his political project was summed up instead by the need to remain in power through the exercise of el mando (command) and defend Spain from the evils of Communism and freemasonry. He came genuinely to see himself as the providential saviour of a Spain understood in terms of its imperial past.
That Franco was able to survive so long in power is a puzzle. For many—notably his Fascist sponsors, but also various members of his close entourage—Franco was an ineffable mediocrity, utterly lacking in charisma. To some extent, his survival depended upon a consummate ability to detect his rivals' weaknesses and, more importantly, their price. He was possessed of genuine political cunning, which enabled him to play off potential opponents from within the regime against each other as well as to buy loyalty. Against opponents from outside the regime, survival was facilitated by his unhesitating use of terror: Franco's victory in the Civil War was marked by tactics of attrition and revenge. The early years of his dictatorship were viciously repressive. Spain was divided into victors and vanquished and, if the scale of the terror had diminished by the 1950s, its memory still served to induce compliance.
Crucially, Franco appears also to have been blessed with baraka, a term used in Morocco to describe a mystical quality of divine protection. Many of his claimed achievements happened in spite of, rather than because of, his best efforts. A central myth of his regime was that Franco employed skilful diplomacy in repelling Hitler's efforts to bring Spain into the war on the Axis side. In fact, Franco was anxious to join the war effort, but wanted to time his entry at a point where victory was assured; he was fortunate that the Führer was not prepared to meet the Spanish leader's price, whilst the Allies' control of fuel and food supplies acted as a further constraint. Franco enjoyed further good fortune in that the emergence of the Cold War transformed his regime from Fascist pariah to bulwark against Communism, with the USA instrumental in sponsoring his reincorporation into the international community. The Caudillo's contribution was simply to survive, confident that the tide would eventually turn.
Similarly, Franco can be accorded little credit for the dramatic economic growth of the 1960s which allowed him to pose as the avuncular overseer of modernization, hunting and fishing as Spain grew rich. His understanding of economic policy was decidedly limited, based on a misplaced belief in autarky. He was, at various points, persuaded of the existence of enormous gold deposits in Extremadura, the invention of synthetic gasoline, and the easing of famine by feeding people dolphin sandwiches. Such credulity was mirrored by his growing belief, reinforced by withdrawal into an ever more rarefied court of sycophantic followers, that he stood comparison with such Spanish heroes as El Cid, Charles V, and Philip II. By the time of Franco's death, his dictatorship represented a political anachronism which would not long survive its founder.
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