Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. 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 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 Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war 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 cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "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 triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
