At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work 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 shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; 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 highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
