On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, 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 strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
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
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned 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 disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, 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 issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
