At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. 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, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
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 British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
