On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.
Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.
Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.
"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.
Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.
His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.
However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.
His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.
Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.
Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.
Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.
Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.
And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.
Marlon Vance is a seasoned sports analyst with over a decade of experience in betting markets, specializing in data-driven predictions and strategy development.
