Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup 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-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside 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 obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm 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 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, 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 twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
