🔗 Share this article

On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. 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 strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. 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 therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.