🔗 Share this article

At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

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

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

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, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back 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 convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction 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. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators 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 risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.