THE DICTATOR DATING GAME:

Instructions: You will be researching and developing the character of your dictator for the dating game. Your group will have one actor and two or three researchers. The actor will be responsible for playing the dictator as well as writing the introduction for the dictator. The researchers will write responses for the questions (on the next page).

The actor must fill in the following spaces. (be creative)

Introduction to the Dictator: (include birthplace, accomplishments, schooling, special events in his life – pretty much a short biography).

What will you wear as the dictator?

RESEARCHERS: Please fill out the question responses below for your actor.
This should reflect the biography of the dictator: (be creative)

Each answer should be at least two well written complete sentences or more.

1. What is your IDEAL date?

2. Where would you go and WHY?

3. What are your PET PEEVES?

4. What kind of books do YOU like?

5. What are YOUR hobbies?

6. What do you do in your SPARE TIME?

7. What are your favorite methods for CONTROLLING the masses?

Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975)

He started his military career in the Infantry at the Academy of Toledo when he was thirty years old he was in charge of the Legion and continued his professional promotion being the youngest Brigade general in Europe. He was the Director of the Military Academy of Zaragoza, the Division General and the Chief of the Central Head State.

He was born at María street on the 4th of December in 1892. He was the second children of a middle-class family of sailors, he went to Sagrado Corazón school which was directed by Manuel Comellas. It seems he did not have a happy childhood. His father left the house and his mother was in charge of his education in an environment of pity and pompous modals. He was a boy with a meticulous aspect, obstipated, prudent and smart.

He could not enter the Naval School following the familiar tradition as it was closed for budgetary reasons after the disaster of 1898. Then he decided to become an Infantry officer and when he was fifteen years old he enters the Academy of the Alcázar of Toledo. Along the three years of his military training he got the respect of his mates in spite of his short height and his extremely fluted voice. He was destined to Ferrol and requested a transfer to Morocco.

There he discovered his passion for giving orders. He was an austere, shy man, with cold eyes and long silences, prudent and calculating, calm and authoritarian. Very soon he called the attention of politician and militaries for his value. In 1916 he was nominated a commander for his merits in campaign. After being seriously wounded he was sent to Oviedo. During the revolution of Asturias in 1917 he repressed with his usual coldness the miners.

In 1920 the Legion was created under the command of another Galician Millán Astray, and Franco accepted his incorporation in Ceuta. His book Marruecos. Diario de una bandera (Madrid, 1922), collected his memories of this time. He came back to the peninsula after being rewarded with a second medal for his military merit. Alfonso XIII promoted him to colonel lieutenant which meant the command of the Legion when he was thirty years old. The King would be his best man when he married Carmen Polo in 1923. He continued his bright military career and in 1926 he was promoted to Brigade General, being the youngest person with this military grade in Europe.

Primo de Rivera revived the Academy of Zaragoza and Franco was nominated his director. He transformed it in a model of its kind.

After the proclaiming of the Republic, some reformations done by Azaña -as the suppression of the Academy of Zaragoza or the decree which abolished the promotions for war merits- annoyed Franco deeply who did not say anything but felt despised. When the government demanded a promise of fidelity to the militaries Franco did not accept his passing to the reserve. In 1932 he took up the command of the Brigade of Infantry of A Coruña and again -as he had done when he was in Africa for the second time- applied for the entrance in a Masonic lodge but he was rejected by the militaries.

After the triumph of the right in the elections of 1933 Franco promoted to Division general. During the revolution in Asturias in 1934 he received the charge from the government to suffocate it and at the front of the colonial troops he crushed the worker's movement. Lerroux rewarded him with the command of the military forces in Morocco. Then he would be nominated Chief of the Central Head State.

With the victory of the Popular Front he lost his hope that the Government requested the Army to re-establish the social order. He was sent to the Canary Islands as a general commander by he considered this decision as an exile, because they wanted to apart him from the peninsula.

The social tension grew everyday and after Calvo Sotelo's Murder, Franco did not believe that the government changed its behaviour. He abandoned his traditional caution because the considered that the situation was the suitable for a coup d'état. On the 17th of June the Army in Morocco arose against the democratic regime. Franco did not take part in the Defence Council created in Burgos by Mola but the war seemed to be on his hands.

On the 30th of January in 1938 he took up the name of Caudillo of Spain, all the State powers, as the General of the Armies supported by his mates in the Army and the Falange. He thought that he was only responsible in front of God and the History. On the 1st of April in 1939 the war finished. For Franco the most important as Tuñón de Lara said was not peace but victory.

The new state would continue for 37 years of absolute personal power. Franco was the most powerful of the rulers in Spain from Felipe II. But when he died in 1975 the regime died.

His ideology came from fascism and it was the ideology of a man with culture and a limited economic training with political ideas rooted in his experience in military life. Thus the Army guaranteed the order and the authority. Enemy of the masons and communism, monarchical without faith and republican without conviction, he had a non-liberal and centralist idea of the State.

In 1942 he wrote under the name of Jaime de Andrade, Raza, an exaltation of traditional values and an overestimation of militaries which would be taken to the cinema.

The international factor conditioned his political behaviour. During the second world war when Franco had an interview with Hitler in Hendaya on the 23rd of October in 1940 he did the least possible concessions in spite he believed in their victory. He avoided the commitment of entering the war with some evasive conditions like territorial vindication and the state of the country after the civil war. After the defeat of fascism he had to face the international isolation which although was not very strong made difficult the diplomatic and economic actions. The new circumstances or the cold war allow him to sign in 1953 the Alliance Treaty with USA and a Concordat with the Holy See. Two years later the UNO recognised his regime and in 1956 he had to accept the independence of Morocco.

After the failure in the autarchic policy of the first years he had to adapt to the necessities of the monopolist capital, starting the contradiction between the Confessional State and the Church. With the process of Burgos in 1970 his power was not so firm. He had a great confidence in his faithful Carrero Blanco but he died violently in 1973 and this was a deep blow for Franco. During his illness in the summer of the following year he did not want to yield the power to prince Juan Carlos. In September of 1975 Franco confirmed five executions. The repressive hardness came into contradiction with the growing crisis in the political system which could not continue after his death. On the 20th of November he was buried at the Valle de los Caídos which he had ordered to be built by the war prisoners.

An order from the Ministry of Interior on the 30 of September in 1938 agreed the unanimous request of the Town Council of calling his native town " El Ferrol del Caudillo" . This name was lost with the conquest of democracy when the first municipal corporation decided on the 28th of December in 1982 to recover the name of Ferrol.

Franco visited his town more than twenty times. The first one was on the 21st of June in 1939. His speech with the pronunciation from Ferro which he never lost was:

"Dear fellows. In this moment in which I live again hours from my childhood, I want to speak to you in this new daybreak of the country. This is a town full of virtues which the poison from Moscow could not destroy. We are raising the building of the Empire of Spain (...). I don't want a Ferrol which watches A Coruña or itself but which watches the sea. Why haven't I come to Ferrol before? Because I wanted to bring the victory (...)".

Many inaugurations he presided were carried out due to his personal initiative.