At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality 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 – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield 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 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed 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 foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. 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 stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part 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 last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
