On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. 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.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. 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 being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, 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 problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
