At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"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 demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred 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
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. 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 provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method 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 population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow 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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers 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 constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
