The Spanish Misguided View of Franco's Regime: Remembering the Horrors

At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

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 shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

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 British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. 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 rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system 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 coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus 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 ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.