Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, 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 year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Truth of Violence and Oppression
Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.
Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials 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 afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
Consequently, 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 regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many 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 medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian 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 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "
The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? 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 remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, 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 inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
