On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either 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, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods 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 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives 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 declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained 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 anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic 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 nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
