On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour 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 year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought 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 subsequent civil conflict. 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 century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters 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 rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "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. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, 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 eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number 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 defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
