At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior 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. Spaniards sank further into misery.
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 UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, 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 US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned 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, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
