🔗 Share this article

Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

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

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained 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 refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador 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 United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations 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 last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning 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 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 death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man 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 public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, 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 courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom 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 childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.