On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
