At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
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 Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, 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 coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. 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 governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar 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 millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.
