At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted 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 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated 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 property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "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 the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative 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 self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing 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 garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center 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 referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome 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 distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues 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 avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
