On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – 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, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, 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 described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
