At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every 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." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. 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 disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "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. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, 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 rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom 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 emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
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 surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. 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.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
