On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "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 Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", 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 restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors 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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted 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
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred 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 dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor 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 Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform 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 not surprising 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 Francoism was really about.
