At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
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 not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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 shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. 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 perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 grandiose facade 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.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, 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 millions of Spaniards, 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre 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 democratic constitution that remains in effect. 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 outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually 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 constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
