🔗 Share this article

At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man 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 ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.