🔗 Share this article

Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," 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 experience being ruled.

The Truth 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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on 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.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts 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 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.