At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
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 shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior 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. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
