At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, 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 broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum 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 explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
