Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "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 Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. 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 foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform 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 major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
