On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," 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 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists 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 emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional 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 most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. 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, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
