At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, 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 contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. 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 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction 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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking 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.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
