Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "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 Reality of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. 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, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by 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 bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. 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 descended deeper into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.