🔗 Share this article

At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators 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 observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm 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 corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some 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 second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right 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. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine 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 deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, 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 only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.