On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported 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 – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, 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 embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction 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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
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 devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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 press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
