At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up 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 – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination 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, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of 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. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
