At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection 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.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy 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 reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. 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 produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
