The Spanish Misguided Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Horrors

On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually 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 autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.