On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method 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 being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, 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 here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think 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.
