At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control 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 blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested 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 refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief 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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
