At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. 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 Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit 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 genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection 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 afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. 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 eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish 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, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional 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, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
