On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped 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 conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain 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.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule 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. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize 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. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" 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 onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
