Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man 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, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness
Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Violence and Oppression
Of course, 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 media, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers 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 here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.
