On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination 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, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
