At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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 flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, 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 "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, 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 dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
