Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize 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 neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
