At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference 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 US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded 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 lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened 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.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
