Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge 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 following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "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 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; 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 deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow 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 thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
