Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "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 experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God 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 ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
