On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, 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 deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
