Spain's Overly Positive View of Franco's Regime: Remembering the Horrors

Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield 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

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives 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 declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. 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 governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat 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.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens 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 ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.