Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," 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 same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted 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 corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen 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 ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version 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. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe 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.
