🔗 Share this article

On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup 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 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated 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 transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking 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 provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened 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, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.