At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded 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 rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
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 afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. 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, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. 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 misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. 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 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 started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster 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 media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
