Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally 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 Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested 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 later. Spaniards sank further 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 lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered 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 publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
