At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless 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 not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome 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 pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system 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 started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable 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 started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine 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 scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have 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 book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
