On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging 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 bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "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. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded 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 absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up 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. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, 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 three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of 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 dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
