On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
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 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents 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 property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper 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 British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. 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 coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances 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 never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised 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
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat 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
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers 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 constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. 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 sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
