Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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 neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for 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 institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
