On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. 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 huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
