🔗 Share this article

On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead 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," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, 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 emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part 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 rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center 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 founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers 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 forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.