At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted 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 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. 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 lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned 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, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around 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 regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
