Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion 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 submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
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. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, 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. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 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 declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
