Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "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 confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
