Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves 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 Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed 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, recalls experiencing sorrow 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 thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version 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 avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
