Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.
The Truth 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.
Overconfidence and Political Revival
Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History
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 tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.
The Danger of Ignorance
During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell 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 major concern.
Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.
