Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, 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 backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck 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, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
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. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
