On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves 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 Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. 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 poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up 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 neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened 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, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed 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. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around 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 dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
