🔗 Share this article

Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France 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: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

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 avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

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 started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, 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 provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, 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 so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as 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 courageous demonstrators, students and laborers 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 autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding 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 not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.