At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after 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 experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets 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 supporters, protested 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 descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad 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 "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly 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 dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, 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 change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
