At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged 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 allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
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 started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, 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, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication 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 problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
