🔗 Share this article

At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, 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 adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, 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 scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.