Carmen Franco, 1st Duchess of Franco
María del Carmen Franco Polo (b. 14 September 1926 in Oviedo; † 29 December 2017 in Madrid) was the daughter of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco and Carmen Polo y Martínez-Valdés. She had seven children from her marriage to surgeon Cristóbal Martínez Bordiú, Marquis de Villaverde. Among them María del Carmen Martínez-Bordiú y Franco, married to Alfons Jaime de Borbón from 1972. She and her family are thus related to the Spanish royal house of Bourbon-Anjou under Felipe VI. Spain's King Juan Carlos I bestowed upon her the title of nobility "Duchess of Franco and Grande of Spain" after the death of her father.
Carmen Franco Polo was always the subject of rumours that she was not the biological child of Carmen Polo and Francisco Franco, who had suffered an abdominal injury in the Rif War of 1916. In reality, she was born of an affair by Ramón Franco and then raised by his brother and his wife. According to historian Stanley Payne, however, this is a newspaper hoax.
Carmen Franco Polo led the foundation "Fundacion Nacional Francisco Franco". She was repeatedly accused of glorifying the years of dictatorship under her father. In 2008 she published a biography about her father. Carmen Franco Polo is considered a figure of identification for the supporters of Francoism. Every year on November 20 ("20-N"), the anniversary of her father's death, she was the guest of honor at the festivities celebrated by thousands of fascists in the underground basilica in the Valle de los Caídos, which until 2019 was still the dictator's final resting place.
Carmen Franco Polo and her foundation have regularly been the focus of criticism. Although the foundation revisionistically celebrates, for example, the coup by the right-wing military under Franco as an "armed plebiscite" and "legitimate national uprising" and engages in similar whitewashing of Spain's era in which, according to historian Borja de Riquer, 140,000 Spaniards were executed in the terror of the Falange, Guardia Civil, and other fascist organizations under Francoism, it received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports under the José María Aznar government until 2004. The ministry justified the funding by saying that the foundation was non-commercial and only archived Franco's private documents. The opposition, on the other hand, spoke of a glorification of the dictatorship through the funding, since a large part of the documents relate to Franco's activities as head of state.
Carmen Franco Polo also ensured that the patron of her foundation, the medievalist Luis Suárez Fernández, presented Franco in the desired light in the Spanish national biography: Franco appears here as a "generalísimo" or "head of state" but not as a "dictator" who had been an "intelligent and moderate" man, a "brave and Catholic" one who had established an "authoritarian but not totalitarian" rule.
In 2013 Carmen Franco Polo was in the attention of the international media because she sued the Spanish artist Eugenio Merino several times for abusing the memory of her father. Under "Cool Franco", Merino had displayed a sculpture of Franco (as well as those of other dictators) in a Coca-Cola fridge, and later he released another object "Punching Franco", in which Franco's head was represented as a punching ball. Carmen Franco Polo, however, failed with her lawsuits through several instances.
After Franco's death in 1975, Carmen Franco Polo inherited part of her father's real estate holdings, as had been stipulated in his will seven years earlier. Her summer residence Pazo de Meiras in the Galician province of A Coruña, including six hectares of woodland, had been given to the dictator by the people during the civil war in 1938: paid for with voluntary donations and voluntary salary sacrifices by civil servants. In recent years, the regional government demanded that Carmen Franco Polo open the gates once a week as a "Bien de Interes Cultural" cultural asset, but it refused.
Works
- Franco, mi padre. La Esfera de los Libros, Madrid 2008, ISBN 978-84-9734-783-9.
