On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" 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 confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained 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 afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction 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", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. 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 Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
