At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – 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 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 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire 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 Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors 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 moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning 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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death 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 referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent 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 local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
