On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need 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 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either 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, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. 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 perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations 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.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. 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 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 parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
