At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over 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 avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 Nazi officials 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 outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism 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 regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned 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 devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. 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 convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
