At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality 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. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
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 state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation 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 ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge 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 break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
