At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
