On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people 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 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen 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", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" 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 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter 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 European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. 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 the new generation what Francoism was really about.
