🔗 Share this article

At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

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

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency 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. As he drove on a victory tour 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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 docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing 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 scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.