Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – 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 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters 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, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded 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 ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained 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 polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn 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 Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly 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 dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
