The Spanish Overly Positive Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Horrors

On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

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 subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, 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 pleaded 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, 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 heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.