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

Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup 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.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen 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 ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished 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 International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms 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 dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.