Spain's Misguided Perception of Franco's Regime: Remembering the Atrocities

On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods 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 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up 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 neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on 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 helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted 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.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy 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. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.