On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky 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
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
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? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
