🔗 Share this article

On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth 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 elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, 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

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded 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 lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

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 insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.