At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, 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 "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome 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 Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. 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 western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. 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 autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship 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 father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. 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.
