Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup 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 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat 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 burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
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 primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
