On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
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 plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour 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 supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors 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 emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage 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 final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 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 demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
