At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists 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.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
