On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning 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, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either 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 brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth 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 forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
