At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, 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. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists 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 emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter 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 highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
