At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every 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 experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted 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 poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
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.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards 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 remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards 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.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers 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 understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
