At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship 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. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
