On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity 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 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, 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 avoided. "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 the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers 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 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
