🔗 Share this article

Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either 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, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

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 owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell 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 huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.