Spain's Misguided Perception of Franco's Regime: Remembering the Horrors

At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead 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 disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained 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 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 US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards 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 making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable 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 final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; 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 biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms 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 arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, 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 surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.