On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by 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 rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, 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 institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
