At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit 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 genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, 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. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens 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 establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine 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 chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book 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 prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject 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 dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
