At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
