Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" 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, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat 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, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well 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 issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
