Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US 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, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
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 primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred 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 vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
