On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves 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 underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed 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 necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, 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, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
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 southern regions, people begged 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, 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 heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man 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 democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
