Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared 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 external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" 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 reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved 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 neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. 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 self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck 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
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts 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 institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, 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 only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
