At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes 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 no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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 later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm 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 poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Calculated, Brutal Conflict
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted 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, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
His belief 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.
As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
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 dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. 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 activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around 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 not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
