At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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 shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property 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. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
