🔗 Share this article

Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want 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." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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 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 declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened 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 highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around 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 think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.