At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, 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 adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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 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 later. The Spanish people sank further 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 UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. 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 founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
