🔗 Share this article

At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 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 ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 allies, complained 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 declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded 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, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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 docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 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 television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, 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 sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.