Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: 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 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy 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 rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a 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, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
