Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, 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. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away 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 famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar 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 European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious 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, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding 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 believe 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.
