🔗 Share this article

On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up 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 – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept 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 southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned 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 government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. 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 governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.