At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted 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 poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: 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, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further 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 complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed 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 European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
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, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
