At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded 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 absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance 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 end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
