🔗 Share this article

Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, 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 later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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 avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat 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. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, 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 drafts 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, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students 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.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.