At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. 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 supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up 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 Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe 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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised 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
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. 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 employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 optimal answer 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 reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, 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 local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
