At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. 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 rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad 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 central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
