At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire 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, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. 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 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism 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. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. 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 so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
