At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – 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 genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "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 the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions 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 accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar 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 thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, 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 surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
