For a recent edition of our Everything You Wanted To Know podcast series I spoke to Professor Paul Preston about the Spanish Civil War, which pitted the Spanish Republic against the Nationalist rebels led by Francisco Franco, who would go on to rule Spain until 1975.
One question I put to Preston – that frequently arises in discussions of Franco – is whether or not he was a ‘fascist’. It’s not a simple question to answer, because, as he explained, “it gets us into the whole area of what ‘fascist’ means”.
“If people are looking for a quick and easy insult to those on the right, then fascist, is your go-to term,” he says. “If you’re asking an academic political theorist what constitutes a fascist then you’d have to say Franco isn’t.”
