On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, 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 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 TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, 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 therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
