The Spanish Misguided Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Atrocities

Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain 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.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, 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 still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction 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 supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.