At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work 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 possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, 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 founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. 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 employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, 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 therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
