On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power 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 plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen 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", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
