On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
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 forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime 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 understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
