Francoland. That is how Antonio Muñoz Molina bitterly referred to the stereotypes about Spain and Spaniards that proliferated in the international press coverage of the political and territorial crisis of 2017, when the bid for independence by the Catalan government and the majority of Catalonia's regional parliament was front-page news. Francoland refers to the allegedly poor and scarcely democratic country depicted by cultural agents paid by the Generalitat de Catalunya. International media outlets repeated this claim without screening and cross-checking their sources. It was alleged that Spain was a country that had not taken accountability for its past and remained culturally, politically, and emotionally tied to Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892–1975). But it must be asked: To what extent is this depiction accurate? Where does the political and narrative centrality attributed to Franco by Catalan nationalism come from? What was (and is) Franco's place in the public imaginary? What remains today of the man and his legacy?

Imagining Franco examines the public image of the dictator Francisco Franco and the social construction(s) of his public biography in four different contexts: the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the post-civil war period (1939– 1949), the rest of the dictatorship (1950–1975), and the democratic period and recent times (1975–2020). It analyses the role that the ‘idea of Franco’ has played and continues to play in contemporary Spain, presenting a comparative interplay between biography, narratives, and public and political uses. The book's central hypothesis is that the multiplicity of narratives that have existed in Spain and abroad regarding the figure of Franco are closely related to both the rhetoric and images generated by those in power and a sort of popular ‘idea of Franco’ (which exists independently of the official narratives).