🔗 Share this article

At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances 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 never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.