Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, 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 supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
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 complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
