Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities 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 vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, 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 threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule 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 polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical 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 believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
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 tell 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 risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
