Carmen Franco
Only child of the Spanish dictator who inherited his fortune and became an icon to the fascist Right
CARMEN FRANCO, who has died aged 91, was the only child of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. Known, variously, as “Carmencita” (to distinguish her from her mother, also Carmen), or as “La Hijisima” (my little daughter), “El Caudillo’s” affectionate name for her, in 1975, as part of the transition to democracy King Juan Carlos bestowed the hereditary title of Duchess of Franco upon her. In addition, through her husband, the Marquis of Villaverde, she was Marchioness of Villaverde.
She became an icon to the country’s fascist Right, participating in the annual acts of hero-worship marking the anniversary of the dictator’s death as well as running the controversial Francisco Franco National Foundation, a private foundation which aims to propagate the dictator’s good name in the official history books. She was also, courtesy of the fortune bequeathed by Franco, head of a substantial property and business empire.
According to propaganda from the regime, the Francos lived off Franco’s modest salary as a field marshal, but this fiction was exposed when the Franco government, with the dictator on his sickbed, awarded his soon-to-be widow a pension of 12.5 million pesetas (US$100,000), which, at the time of her death in 1988 was $32,000 more than the salary of the then Prime Minister Felipe González.
The forces of Spain’s fragile new democracy judged it better to encourage forgiveness than to stir old antagonisms. As a result the Francos slipped through the cracks left open by the desire for reconciliation that guided Spain’s transition from dictatorship. Indeed democratic Spain was so patient with the family that both Carmen and her husband, the Marquis of Villaverde, were allowed to keep their diplomatic passports until 1986.
This fact was made public in April 1978, when Carmen was stopped by a customs officer at Barajas Airport, en route to Lausanne, when her bag triggered a metal detector. It was found to be full of jewelencrusted medallions, valued at $25,000, supposedly the property of the Spanish state. Carmen was accused of smuggling and fined 6.8 million pesetas, but the conviction was overturned a year later.
The medallions were among hundreds of “gifts” given to the dictator from a grateful populace, or people hoping for favours. These ranged from a herd of sheep to three palaces: the historical Pazo de Meiras castle, given to Franco by a group of Galician businessmen during the Civil War (they were said to have raised the money by docking the wages from their workers and collecting public donations); the 2,000 sq m Canto del Pico palace, built early in the last century in Torrelodones, Madrid, and given to Franco by the Count of Las Almenas in 1941 as a weekend retreat; and the 18th century Palacio de Cornide in A Coruña, which was bought in 1965 by the Count of Fenosa, who registered it in the name of Franco’s wife.
No inventory was ever made of these presents; the family always considered such offerings to be family assets.
Mariano Sánchez Soler, author of Los Franco SA, claimed that the Francos had assets worth well over a billion pesetas in 1975. In the years that followed, however, they failed to make any sort of mark as entrepreneurs. In fact, until a 2,500-acre estate they owned in Valdefuentes, near Madrid, was reclassified in 2003 as suitable for residential and retail development, the Francos had had to sell off bits and pieces to maintain their opulent lifestyle, including the Canto del Pico palace, which Carmen sold for 320 million pesetas (US$2.7 million) in 1988. More recent estimates put the family fortune at more than €500 million.
Carmen Franco herself presided over several companies officially headquartered in her home on Madrid’s Calle Hermanos Bécquer, involved in everything from property, flat rentals and parking lots to pizza restaurants, clinics and television and telecommunication companies; some were created in democratic times, others were survivors of her father’s regime.
One after another, Spain’s democratic governments tiptoed round the difficult issue of rightful ownership, not wanting to reopen old wounds. In recent years, however, the public mood seemed to have shifted, emboldening some in authority to flex their muscles. In 2007 Carmen Franco hired a lawyer to block the path of inspectors from the regional administration in Galicia who had tried to enter the Pazo de Meiras to carry out an inspection, claiming that its owners were in breach of an obligation to open the home to the public four days a month. The case led to demands in parliament for the Franco clan to vacate some of its sumptuous properties on the grounds that they had been expropriated by the former leader.
The same year the socialist government of José Luiz Rodríguez Zapatero, the grandson of a republican executed by Franco’s soldiers, cut off state funding for the Franco Foundation and passed a law banning political rallies outside the basilica in the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) in which Franco is buried. There has also been a long-running political debate over proposals that Franco’s remains be exhumed and buried elsewhere, a proposal vehemently opposed by his only daughter.
María del Carmen Ramona Felipa María de la Cruz Franco y Polo was born on September 14 1926 in Oviedo, exactly 10 years before the outbreak of the brutal civil war which her father won with the aid of Adolf Hitler. Carmen seldom gave interviews about her father, but in 2008 she published a memoir, My Father, in which she characterised him as an “intelligent and moderate”, “brave and Catholic” man who had established an “authoritarian, but not totalitarian” regime.
Whatever he was to his enemies, Franco was, by all accounts, a doting father, albeit one who did not harbour enlightened views on the role of women. Young Carmen was sketchily educated by governesses. Aged 10 she popped up in a propaganda film in a white, frilly frock to send a kiss “to all the children of the world”, before crying “Viva España” and giving the fascist salute.
In 1950, aged 24, she married Cristóbal Martínez-bordiú, the penniless heir to the Marquis of Villaverde, in a lavish ceremony at El Pardo. Though they had seven children, Martínez-bordiú was a serial philanderer and it was not a happy marriage. A surgeon, he undertook Spain’s first heart transplant in 1968, but the patient died 26 hours after the operation and in 2011 the dead man’s daughter launched legal proceedings against the Franco family claiming the operation never should have been performed, that it had been undertaken under pressure from the regime to glorify fascism, and demanding compensation for his death.
Martínez-bordiú also led the medical team that attended Franco in the months before his death in 1975. In the mid-1980s, however, he was dismissed from a hospital in Madrid over questions of his medical competence after one of his patients died in controversial circumstances. He died in 1998.
Carmen’s children were entrusted to a nanny and she admitted that she had probably not been “the mother they hoped for”. Some of them gave the tabloid press plenty of material in the first decades of democracy. Her eldest son Francisco was arrested for poaching and investigated in Chile for fraud; another son, José Cristóbal, made headlines during a stint in the army when he complained that the uniform made him look like a “dickhead”; her daughter Carmen, meanwhile, led a life marked by divorces and affairs that fed the gossip magazines for years. Her youngest son, Jaime, was convicted of beating his girlfriend in 2009.
All her children survive her.
Carmen Franco, born September 14 1926, died December 29 2017