Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally 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 Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy 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. Suddenly, tourists 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 foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, 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 discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
