Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued 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 neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter 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 western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
