The Spanish Overly Positive View of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Atrocities

On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity 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 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God 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", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. 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 founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, 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 a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.