Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," 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 identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted 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 property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained 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 declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms 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 owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
