Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. 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: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 supporting 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
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, 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. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned 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, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, 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 a large number accepted this.
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 forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster 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 press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
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 indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered 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 growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
