At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather 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," 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 Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, 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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised 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 final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
