At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. 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 bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. 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 dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested 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 refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, 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 produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
