Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade 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 misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions 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 believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. 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 think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
