The Spanish Overly Positive View of Franco's Regime: Revisiting the Horrors

On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, 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 "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some 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 second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.