On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves 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
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm 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, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
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.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. 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 only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
