On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. 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: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, 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 possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances 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 "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used 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 chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
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 break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
