Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
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. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, 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 contaminated 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 transferred 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 adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, 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 always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage 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 violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution 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 reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised 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 high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
