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

Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: 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 necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside 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 lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting 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.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic 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 think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.