🔗 Share this article

On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

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. Nor would he have shot 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 restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

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

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule 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 anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. 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 final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? 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 remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.