Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. 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 think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
