Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. 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 demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised 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 started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed 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, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man 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 founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. 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 printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
