Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime over four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man 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 ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
