At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant 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 saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality 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. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either 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, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow 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 "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
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 begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further 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 UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," 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. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication 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 printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship 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 dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
