On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods 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 the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth 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 remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; 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 boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
