At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years 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. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
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 accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded 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 absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. 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 moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; 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 deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
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 change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
