Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade 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. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed 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 chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell 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 huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. 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 educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
