On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness
To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.
His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.
"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, 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. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
But he was wrong. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing 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 suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number 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 strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning 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 school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, 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 issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.
