Early life
Francisco Franco Bahamonde was born on 4 December 1892 in the Calle Frutos Saavedra in Ferrol, Galicia, into a seafaring family. He was baptised thirteen days later at the military church of San Francisco, with the baptismal name Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo.
After relocating to Galicia, the Franco family was involved in the Spanish Navy, and over the span of two centuries produced naval officers for six uninterrupted generations (including several admirals), down to Franco's father Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araújo (22 November 1855 – 22 February 1942).
His mother, María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade (15 October 1865 – 28 February 1934), was from an upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family. Her father, Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, was the commissar of naval equipment at the Port of El Ferrol. Franco's parents married in 1890 in the Church of San Francisco in El Ferrol. The young Franco spent much of his childhood with his two brothers, Nicolás and Ramón, and his two sisters, María del Pilar and María de la Paz. His brother Nicolás was a naval officer and diplomat who married María Isabel Pascual del Pobil. Ramón was an internationally known aviator and a Freemason, originally with leftist political leanings. He was also the second sibling to die, killed in an air accident on a military mission in 1938.
Franco's father was a naval officer who reached the rank of vice admiral (intendente general). When Franco was fourteen, his father moved to Madrid following a reassignment and ultimately abandoned his family, marrying another woman. While Franco did not suffer any great abuse by his father's hand, he would never overcome his antipathy for his father and largely ignored him for the rest of his life. Years after becoming dictator, under the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, Franco wrote a brief novel called Raza, whose protagonist is believed by Stanley Payne to represent the idealised man Franco wished his father had been. Conversely, Franco strongly identified with his mother (who always wore widow's black once she realised her husband had abandoned her) and learned from her moderation, austerity, self-control, family solidarity and respect for Catholicism, though he would also inherit his father's harshness, coldness and implacability.