🔗 Share this article

At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – 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 rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted 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, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? 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 democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.