On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 individuals afterwards.
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 plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. 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 self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened 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
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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 drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think 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.
