Spain's Misguided View of Franco's Regime: Revisiting the Atrocities

Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior 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 later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled 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 banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of 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 regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.