🔗 Share this article

Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless 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 United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: 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 necessity 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.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either 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 strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance 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

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked 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 burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. 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 founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, 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 trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

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

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.