Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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 shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded 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 absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home 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 did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, 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 labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers 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 forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
