Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms 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 dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
