🔗 Share this article

Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people 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 lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.