On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities 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 powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, 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 have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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, protested that a impressive exterior 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 afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
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 British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy 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 begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable 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 regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted 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.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
