Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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 strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, 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 incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
