At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup 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 mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade 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 later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved 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 started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed 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 European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 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 demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered 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 discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
