On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. 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: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
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 have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy 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. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
