Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "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 triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – 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 devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
