On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," 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." 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result 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 southern regions, people pleaded 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; 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 highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. 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 supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication 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. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. 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 major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
