🔗 Share this article

At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved 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 actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

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

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" 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.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned 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 docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

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. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band 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 western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, 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 sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.