Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment 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 threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat 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 anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter 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 being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad 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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
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 growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people 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.
