At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation 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 direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable 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 finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted 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
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students 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 therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
