On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect 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 forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. 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 produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
