Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging 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, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
