Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. 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 foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian 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 felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document 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 pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. 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 printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
