On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after 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 see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested 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 descended deeper into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band 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 European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a 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 dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
