Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted 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 poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior 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 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 insisted on a lifelong term 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that 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, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
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, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
