On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist 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: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity 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 shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing 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
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
