Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists 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 experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed 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 poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism 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 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 southern coast. Numerous citizens 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 establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, 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 boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 hard to rule," 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. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism 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 distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding 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 dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
