🔗 Share this article

On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, 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 contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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 begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually 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 here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.