Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted 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 external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away 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 starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors 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 moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened 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
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
