On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, 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 powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. 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 foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war 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 allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens 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 establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, 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 labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, 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 drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees 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 not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
