Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. 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: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged 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 turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, 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.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood 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 major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
