FRANCO: A Concise Biography

Hodges (the wife of Paul Preston, another Franco biographer) has written an engaging and highly accessible account of one of the 20th century's most durable dictators. The diminutive and contradictory Francisco Franco (1892–1975), who as a youth had seemed such an unlikely leader, rose to power with the military support of Hitler and Mussolini in an atmosphere of brutal civil war. Orwellian repression, economic slump and widespread corruption marked his lengthy reign. How did this "deeply flawed individual" remain at Spain's helm for nearly 40 years? Hodges's slim volume is an attempt to explain the "political, personal, psychological and social influences" behind his success. In 1907, as the teenage Franco joined the army, his father left his strict Catholic wife to move in with another woman; this act of abandonment, Hodges argues, instilled a lifelong yearning for order in Franco. As a fearless young soldier in colonial Morocco, Franco became a national hero, and by 33 he was a general. When he challenged the Republican government in 1936, he triggered a civil war—as well as gaining aid from fascist Italy and Germany that helped him to win it. During WWII, Franco, displaying an opportunistic "elasticity of ideological convictions," played both sides of the fence, and after the war, despite his shocking human rights record, he was grudgingly accepted into the anticommunist bloc. A true survivor, he held onto power until 1975. Through it all, Hodges writes, he exhibited a marked talent for self-delusion and a "ruthless obsession with his own survival." This brief, well-written biography may not break any new ground, but it should appeal to both the general history reader and to those with an interest in the Spanish Civil War. (Apr.)