Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed 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 historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed 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. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
