On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar 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 population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly 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 issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
