Spain's Misguided View of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Horrors

Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

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

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

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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not 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 make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

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 British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

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, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, 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 hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, 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 here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.