Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade 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
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to 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 US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on 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.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar 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, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
