Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of 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 US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that 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 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.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. 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 therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
