At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after 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 experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. 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 restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors 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 moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, 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 forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
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 growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
