At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France 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 same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, 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 "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
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 did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts 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.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. 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 employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, 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 described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
