At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, 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 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened 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
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed 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 dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. 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 dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
