🔗 Share this article

At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

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 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation 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 male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated 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, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.