Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought 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 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 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, 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 Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, 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 most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, 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 problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
