At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior 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 – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved 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 – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products 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 southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
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 primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that 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 labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened 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
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning 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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, 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 secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
