Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
