At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose 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. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
