On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
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 operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term 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. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors 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 helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre 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 referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
