At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, 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 mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either 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, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, 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 embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished 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 US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned 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 devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, 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 believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
