Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. 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 pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on 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 moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage 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 final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, 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. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
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 high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
