At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats 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 year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts 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 foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy 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 final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls 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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch 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.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
