At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise 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 year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," 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 victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible 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 polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – 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 politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
