At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, 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 dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," 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. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, 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. Spaniards descended deeper 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 complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; 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 highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news 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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
