Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, 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 "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 grandiose facade 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 later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many 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 violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred 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 vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship 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 huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
