Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen 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", 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 restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved 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. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
