At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
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 elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts 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
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
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 12-year-old boy was felt 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around 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 not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
