A fair-minded critical assessment of the man who for 40 years was Spain's dictator. It depicts him as being originally an old-fashioned nationalist patriot, certain that the army was the guarantor of the nation which quarreling liberal civilians had for decades weakened and betrayed. The author, a Spanish historian with long English associations, is also very good on the slow disintegration of the Franco regime in the 1970s.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1988-03-01/franco-biography