At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
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 tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, 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 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 issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining 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 Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
