At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after 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 experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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 stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
