On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed 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 see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted 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 corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," 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. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
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 British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version 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. College attendees 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 huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
