On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products 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 the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador 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 rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable 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 finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method 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
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer 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 reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
