At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", 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 anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed 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
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for 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 sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
