At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. 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 begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept 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. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised 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 defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
