At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome 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 Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting 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 accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
