Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials 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. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire 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 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based 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, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, 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 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising 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 educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
