At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted 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 Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," 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. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some 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 World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, 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 here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. 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 risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
