At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were 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 strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into 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 infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize 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. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm 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 government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
