At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained 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 polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States 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, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
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, 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 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 ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
