On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
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 UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. 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 stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial 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.
