On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked 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 anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
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, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect 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 final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
