Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance 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 starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, 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 drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable 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 rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
