At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
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 British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform 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.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
