On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
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. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. 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 oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
