At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States 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, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining 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
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
