🔗 Share this article

At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

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 not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

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 invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, 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 employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.