At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing 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 personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion 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 submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
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. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," 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. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
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 end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
