FINIS: 36 YEARS OF IRON RULE

He had come to be regarded not so much as a man but as an enduring symbol of authoritarianism. At 82, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, the Caudillo of Spain, had become increasingly secluded, aloof from the people, distant even from his own subordinates. The olive-colored flesh sagged in folds from his face, his palsied right hand trembled continuously, and the speech--once shrill and demanding--was slurred and frequently unintelligible. The figure, barely 5 ft. 3 in. tall, had never been especially heroic, even in a general's uniform decorated with medals, sash and sword; in recent years it seemed smaller and withered. But until last week, Franco never relaxed the hard control he wielded over Spain for almost 40 years--not even in 1974, when he temporarily turned over his powers to Prince Juan Carlos after an attack of phlebitis. A stern, indomitable autocrat, he had outlived such contemporary dictators as Hitler and Mussolini, ancient foes like Stalin, and his old neighbor and fellow dictator, Portugal's Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

The grand scheme that Franco devised for an orderly transfer of power to Juan Carlos was frustrated two years ago. While he had long wanted the Prince to have the title of head of state, el Caudillo also intended that the regime's authoritarian rule should be carried on by his closest friend, the ultraconservative Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, who for seven years had served as Franco's subservient Vice President. Thus in 1973 Franco transferred his titles of President and head of government to Carrero Blanco, 70, who presumably would have become the real power behind Juan Carlos after Franco's death. That plan died along with Carrero Blanco in December 1973 when Basque terrorists set off an explosive charge as the admiral drove from morning Mass at Madrid's San Francisco de Borja Church.

After the death of Carrero Blanco, Franco spent most of his time behind the walls of El Pardo Palace, a luxurious retreat on the fringes of Madrid built by King Charles V in 1543. Except for occasional fishing trips aboard his yacht the Azor or official visits to the Valley of the Fallen, a monumental Civil War Memorial that was at one time intended to serve as his tomb, Franco rarely emerged from his palace. Even the fishing trips must have become a dispiriting confirmation of the mortality he hated to acknowledge, a further assault on the pride he took in past feats of skill and stamina. In 1957 he had been named national amateur fishing champion for catching a 712-lb. tuna with rod and reel, the largest ever landed by rod in Spanish waters. He also boasted of shooting 8,420 partridges in one year.

The sporting life, which offered Franco virtually his only escape from official routine, was abandoned in recent years for the regal pleasures of a cloistered castle existence: liveried servants, Moorish guards on white stallions, walls covered with Goya tapestries--and obsequiousness everywhere. Foreign ambassadors who were granted audiences with the Caudillo had a precise protocol of steps and bows. In addition to his love of pomp, Franco was a man of rigid decorum, methodical habit and deep Christian piety; his orderly days included regular attendance at Mass and midnight recitation of the rosary with his wife, the former Carmen Polo y Martinez Valdes. His few moments of relaxation were spent with his six grandchildren by his only child Carmencita, or in painting. Seascapes were his favorite subject.

Though he was a legend to his people, Franco was never close to them. The son of a naval paymaster, he was born in Galicia on the Atlantic coast. Franco entered the Academia de Infanteria at Toledo in 1907 at the age of 15. During the Spanish campaign against the Riffs of Morocco between 1912 and 1926 he gained a reputation for unflinching physical courage. A three-time winner of the Medal of Military Merit, Franco was promoted to Spain's youngest captain at 22, major at 23, colonel at 32, and, at 33, he became the youngest general in Europe since Napoleon.

Franco, as recent generations of Spaniards have been allowed to forget, was not a rebel leader before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Although he was King Alfonso's favorite general, Franco remained cautiously on the sidelines when the monarchy, abolished in a democratic election in 1931, was replaced by a reformist Republican government whose moderate policies were opposed by extremists of both right and left. He refused to take part in several abortive, ill-planned military revolts against the Republicans, and in 1934 crushed an anti-Republican uprising of Asturian miners so mercilessly that he earned the nickname "Butcher." His loyalties, however, seemed more a matter of timing than of principle. When a leftist Popular Front government of Communists, socialists and anarchists swept the elections of 1936, bringing waves of street fighting, strikes and assassinations, Franco finally joined a plot by military men, fascists, monarchists and rightists of all persuasions to overthrow the Republican government. On July 17, 1936, the daring young general gained world headlines by launching a successful air and sea invasion of the Spanish mainland. Within 24 hours, Hitler and Mussolini were sending men and supplies to the rebels, and the Republic had clearly found its archadversary. Franco was proclaimed Generalissimo of the rebel forces and Chief of State in a brief ceremony at Burgos on Oct. 1,1936.

The 2 1/2 years of fighting that followed constitute one of the grimmest episodes in modern European history. Military campaigns of unparalleled ferocity led to enormous casualties on both sides, usually for little or no strategic gain. Saturation bombing campaigns and continuous artillery bombardments of cities gave the world its first views of "total" war involving civilian populations. The war became a testing ground for the weapons and strategies of World War II. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy used the Spanish war to perfect the Stuka dive bomber and the tactics of incendiary bombing that in one day destroyed the town of Guernica, among many others. The Soviet Union backed the Popular Front government, as did Communists everywhere. But the vastly greater weight of German and Italian arms, coupled with the decision by the Russians and Germans to seek a nonaggression pact, which dried up Soviet support for the Republicans, eventually gave the victory to Franco's forces.

Spain's Civil War was not only a testing ground for arms but also for ideals. Volunteers poured in from around the world--including 3,100 Americans who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and other units--to fight on the Republican side against Franco. They believed that a Republican victory in the Spanish Civil War was the only way to stop the spread of fascism. Nearly half of the American volunteers died in Spain.

A brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, had their lives and work shaped irrevocably by their experiences in Spain. "As a militiaman," George Orwell later wrote in Homage to Catalonia, "one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between political theories." Albert Camus observed afterwards: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."

The war ended with the capture of Madrid by Franco's forces in early 1939. More than 500,000 Spaniards had been killed in the fighting; nearly 100,000 more were victims of wartime terror and firing squads. There were to be other victims. Franco's victorious forces took a bloody and merciless revenge on their political enemies. Between 1939 and 1942, nearly 2 million people were imprisoned by the Franco regime for supporting the Loyalists, and perhaps 200,000 of them were executed.

By war's end, Franco had assumed command of the country's political forces as well as its army. He took over the program and rhetoric of the Falange, a fascist party dedicated to violence and armed revolution, and vowed to build "a totalitarian instrument" that would "reinforce the hierarchic principle, exalt love of country, practice social justice and foster the well-being of the middle and working classes." Franco integrated the Falange into his Movimiento Nacional, made a secular saint of the Falange's executed leader, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, and used it to control rival political movements as well as the Falangists themselves. The Movimiento became Spain's sole legal political party and a personal instrument for carrying out Franco's policies. Franco ruthlessly set his secret police on all dissenters. The press was severely censored and intellectuals were harried. Businesses were tightly controlled, and only friends of the dictator seemed able to get the proper government licenses or escape ruinous taxes.

For nearly a quarter-century, Spaniards suffered along with the Portuguese as the most oppressed people in Western Europe. So abhorrent to Western democracies was Franco's regime that both the United Nations in 1945 and the Common Market later refused to let Spain join. A desire by the U.S. for air and submarine bases led to a military pact in 1953 that boosted Spain's standing in the international community. It did little, however, to reform Franco's cruel and backward rule.

Oppression began to ease in the early 1960s when Franco, aware that his country was missing out on Western Europe's mushrooming prosperity, gave a young group of pragmatic technocrats a chance to guide Spain's economic policies. Private industries were offered a five-year tax holiday, duty-free equipment imports, easy credit terms and attractive plant sites as incentives to set up shop in Spain's capital-starved provinces. Some 70 companies moved into the city of Valladolid within four years, bringing $75 million in investments and 8,200 new jobs. Similar boom towns sprang up throughout Spain. Tourism flourished beyond the technocrats' wildest imaginings when Spam's stern moral codes were relaxed to permit bikinis on beaches where 15 years before men had been arrested for not wearing tops. Sleepy fishing hamlets on Spain's southern coast were suddenly flanked by burgeoning glassy skylines of luxury apartments, and there was standing room only on once desolate beaches. The result for Spain was its own economic miracle--a swift switch from decaying feudal empire to industrial state. The gross national product rose from $29.3 billion in 1963 to an estimated $65 billion in 1974, and there was a corresponding increase in per capita income, from $934 in 1963 to $2,100 today.

The economic miracle also created a new middle class that began to murmur about the need for social freedoms and political privileges to accompany the economic advances. Franco, determined to maintain firm control over all aspects of Spanish life, would not sanction such reforms and indeed did not understand the need for them. Students demonstrated for educational reforms at universities in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santiago, Valencia and Seville and doggedly battled police who sought to stop them. Liberal priests and moderate bishops changed the Roman Catholic Church from a staunch supporter of the regime to an independent and often critical force for change. Increasingly rebellious workers defied the government-run syndicates that controlled labor and attempted to set up their own unions. Basque extremists, seeking political, linguistic and cultural freedom for their section of northern Spain, carried on an unremitting campaign of terror that, in addition to the assassination of Carrero Blanco, has included the systematic murder of security police.

The Caudillo spent his last years in public life trying to keep a lid on Spain's seething political cauldron. The nation's conservatives reacted nervously not only to the death of Admiral Carrero Blanco but to events in neighboring Portugal. In the wake of the Lisbon coup, the army, the dreaded militia known as the Guardia Civil and the Cabinet were safely installed in conservative hands.

Franco had no faith that his mercurial people might possibly learn how to govern themselves. Ultimately, the kind of apolitical serenity that he wanted for Spain has proved to be an unattainable ideal. Nonetheless, it is a tribute of sorts to his dictatorial skills that he was able to maintain a fac,ade of peace for so long.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.