At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded 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, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy 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 last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, 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 realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe 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.
