Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
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 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to 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 US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy 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 rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed 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.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
