At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France 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 identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade 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 later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule 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, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished 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. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
