At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "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 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band 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 western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.