On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were 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, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated 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.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn 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 still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship 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 father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
