Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, 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 still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted 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 scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. 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 dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts 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, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of 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 tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
