On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished 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 conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
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 medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
