Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
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 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 restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products 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 victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. 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 demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad 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 central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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 press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. 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 produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
