At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded 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 direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy 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 begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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 establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
