On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity 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 executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting 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 descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting 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 book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
