🔗 Share this article

Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters 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, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, 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 selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term 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, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, 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 employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.