The Little Matchstick that ignited civil war

Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the Spanish-born waiter in Bonn’s Casa Pepe approached my table, it struck me as an opportune moment to solicit his opinion about the former dictator. ‘No sé mucho,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know a whole lot.’

Just imagine it: an unexceptional army cadet becomes a general in his mid-
thirties, leads the Nationalists to victory in a bloody civil war, wields absolute power for close to three decades, and then, barely a generation later, his memory is reduced to an indifferent shrug.

The contrast with Germany’s treatment of its totalitarian past could not be greater. Students are compelled to study every angle of the Third Reich. School trips are organised to former concentration camps. The past is ever present, lest it be repeated.

Not so in Spain. Franco and Francoism are effectively off-limits, swept under the carpet of history in a nationwide act of amnesia. The old bugger is dead and gone, the theory seems to go. Let the nation move on, rid at last of his suffocating shadow, able to breathe freely once again.

This all makes Enrique Moradiellos’s new biography of the Generalíssimo long overdue. Written explicitly for an English-speaking readership, the book makes up for lost time, providing an extensive introduction to both Franco and Francoism. The result is a three-part structure that examines the man, the dictator and the regime in turn.

Part One is a conventional biography. Born in 1892 into a lower-middle-class family from the northernmost tip of Spain, the young Francisco revealed little in his early years that pointed towards a dictator-in-waiting. Indeed, so weedy was the country’s future strongman that his classmates called him ‘Little Matchstick’.