The Spanish Overly Positive View of Franco's Regime: Revisiting the Horrors

On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

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

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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 regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed 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 own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.