On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into 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 lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years 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 fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised 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 avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
