🔗 Share this article

At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. 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, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues 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 avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

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 the Franco era was truly like.