At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
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. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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 begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. 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
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
