🔗 Share this article

Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "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 the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. 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 founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs 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 referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.