Carmen Franco y Polo

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María del Carmen Franco Polo (born September 14, 1926 in Oviedo ; † December 29, 2017 in Madrid ) was the daughter of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco and Carmen Polo y Martínez-Valdés . Her marriage to the surgeon Cristóbal Martínez Bordiú, Marquis de Villaverde, has seven children. Including María del Carmen Martínez-Bordiú y Franco, married to Alfons Jaime de Borbón from 1972. She and her family are thereby with the Spanish royal house Bourbon-Anjou under Felipe VI. related. After the death of her father, Spain’s King Juan Carlos I gave her the title ofDuchess of Franco and Grandee of Spain”.

There were always rumors about Carmen Franco Polo that she was not the birth child of Carmen Polo and Francisco Franco, who sustained an abdominal injury in the 1916 Rif War. In reality, she emerged from an affair with Ramón Franco and was then raised by his brother and his wife. According to historian Stanley Payne , however, this is a newspaper duck .

Carmen Franco Polo ran the “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 seen as a figure of identification among the supporters of Franquism . Annually on November 20th (" 20-N "), the anniversary of her father's death, she was the guest of honor at the celebrations of thousands of fascists in the underground basilica in the Valle de los Caídos , which until 2019 was the dictator's final resting place.

Carmen Franco Polo and her foundation have regularly been the focus of criticism. Although the foundation is revisionist z. B. celebrates the coup of the right-wing military under Franco as an "armed referendum" and "legitimate national uprising" and does similar whitewash for the epoch of Spain, in which, according to the historian Borja de Riquer, 140,000 Spaniards in the terror of Falange , Guardia Civil and other fascists Organizations in Franquism were executed, she received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport under the José María Aznar government until 2004. The ministry justified the funding by stating that the foundation was non-commercial and only archived Franco's private documents. The opposition, however, spoke of a glorification of the dictatorship through funding, since a large part of the documents relates to Franco's activity as head of state .

Carmen Franco Polo also made sure that the patronage member of her foundation, the medievalist Luis Suárez Fernández, let Franco appear 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 was an "intelligent and moderate", a "brave and Catholic" man who had established an "authoritarian but not totalitarian" rule.

In 2013 Carmen Franco Polo caught 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 exhibited a sculpture of Franco (as well as that of other dictators) in a Coca-Cola refrigerator, later he brought out another object “Punching Franco”, in which Franco's head was depicted as a punching ball. Carmen Franco Polo failed with her lawsuits over several instances.

After Franco's death in 1975, Carmen Franco Polo inherited part of her father's real estate, as set out in his will seven years earlier. During the civil war in 1938 , the dictator received her summer residence Pazo de Meiras in the Galician province of A Coruña, including six hectares of forest, as a gift from the people: paid for with “voluntary” donations and “voluntary” wage waivers by officials. In recent years, the regional government has demanded that Carmen Franco Polo should open the gates once a week as a “Bien de Interes Cultural” as a cultural asset , but they refused.

Works

Individual evidence

  1. Spanish dictator's only child Carmen Franco dies aged 91 . Belfast Telegraph , December 29, 2017, accessed December 30, 2017.
  2. Ute Müller: The Francos - a terribly… rich family . In: Die Welt , November 20, 2015, accessed December 30, 2017.
  3. Spain's dictator Franco lost testicles in the war . In: Die Welt , May 27, 2009, accessed December 30, 2017.
  4. Jay Nordlinger : Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators . Encounter Books, 2017, ISBN 978-1-59403-900-3 , pp. 25–28 ( limited preview ).
  5. Leo Wieland: It's good that the dictator is in the other world . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 17, 2015, accessed on December 30, 2017.
    Leo Wieland: New book about the "Caudillo": Franco's wife made a lot of prayers . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 28, 2008, accessed December 30, 2017.
  6. Stefanie Müller: 30 years later: Franco's delicate legacy . In: Handelsblatt , November 19, 2005, accessed December 30, 2017.
  7. a b Martin Dahms: Dogged administrator . ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Sächsische Zeitung September 5, 2007 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sz-online.de
  8. Franco's bones from the mausoleum are reburied in the family grave . In: Deutsche Welle October 24, 2019, accessed on January 19, 2020.
  9. Ralf Streck: In bed with Franco . In: Telepolis August 26, 2003, accessed December 30, 2017.
  10. ^ Paul Ingendaay: Spanish national biography: Franco, the brave . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 13, 2011, accessed on December 30, 2017.
    Jan-Henrik Witthaus , Patrick Eser: Rulers of Modernity: For the Representation of Political Rule and Corporeality (=  Volume 68 of Edition Kulturwissenschaft ). Transcript Verlag , 2015, ISBN 978-1-59403-900-3 , pp. 224 ( limited preview ).
  11. Spanish artist fights for Franco punching ball . AFP article in: Daily Nation ( Kenya ) , December 29, 2013, accessed December 30, 2017.
  12. Spanish Artist sued over 'Punching Franco' work. In: Japan Times . December 30, 2013, archived from the original on November 7, 2014 ; accessed on December 30, 2017 (English). J. Jiménez Gálvez: El creador de 'Punching Franco' en el juicio: "Detrás de esos golpes había arte" . In: El País , February 28, 2014, accessed December 30, 2017 (Spanish).
  13. Javier Romera: La fortuna de los Franco: la familia tiene un patrimonio de 500 millones. In: elEconomista.es . November 23, 2007, Retrieved December 30, 2017 (Spanish).