Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime over four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were 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, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, 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 rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method 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 western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, 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 growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding 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 believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
