At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any 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 – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.
Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a 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 dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.
