🔗 Share this article

At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "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 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used 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 child, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," 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. Ultimately, what occurs 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 public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.