On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, 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.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king 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 vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. 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 versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.