Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, 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 obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief 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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad 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 primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage 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 violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? 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. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five 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 the Franco era was truly like.
