On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned 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 extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, 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 year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. 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: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, 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, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US 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 started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part 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 last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. 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 employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.
