7 Francisco Franco 7thousands of executions carried out by the Nationalist
regime, which continued during the first years after the
war ended, earned Franco more reproach than any other
single aspect of his rule.
Franco’s Dictatorship
Although Franco had visions of restoring Spanish gran-
deur after the Civil War, in reality he was the leader of an
exhausted country still divided internally and impover-
ished by a long and costly war. The stability of his
government was made more precarious by the outbreak
of World War II only five months later. Franco declared
Spanish neutrality in the conflict. After a failed attempt
to negotiate with Hitler, his government thenceforth
remained relatively sympathetic to the Axis powers while
carefully avoiding any direct diplomatic and military com-
mitment to them.
The most difficult period of Franco’s regime began in
the aftermath of World War II, when his government was
ostracized by the newly formed United Nations. He was
labeled by hostile foreign opinion as the “last surviving
fascist dictator.” For a time, Franco appeared to be the
most hated of Western heads of state, but within his
country, as many people supported him as opposed him.
Relations with other nations regularized with the onset of
the Cold War, as Franco became a leading anticommunist
statesman.
Franco’s domestic policies became somewhat more
liberal during the 1950s and 1960s, and the continuity of
his regime, with its capacity for creative evolution, won
him a limited degree of respect from some of his critics.
The Falange state party, downgraded in the early 1940s, in
later years became known merely as the “Movement” and
lost much of its original quasi-Fascist identity.