Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible 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 ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts 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.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back 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 broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
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 growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
