Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result 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 pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting 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 publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
