On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – 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 poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up 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, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage 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 last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
