On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were 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 Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents 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 rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, 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 always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. 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 culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
