🔗 Share this article

At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," 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 same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists 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 moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled 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, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. 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 latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.