At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime over four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme 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. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "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 Truth of Violence and Oppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. 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 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.
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 UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.
Fear and the Transition to Democracy
However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.
Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.
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 educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.
