On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy 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. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck 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.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, 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 remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth 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 dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
