On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, 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 "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance 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
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, 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 begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method 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 employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
