On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it 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 brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some 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 World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, 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 therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance 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 break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
