At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation 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.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls 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 millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
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 dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
