At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.
"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. 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, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.
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 "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Starvation and Isolation
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat 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. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up 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 neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards 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 did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable 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 finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.
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, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a issue. 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, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
