🔗 Share this article

On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," 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." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

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. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – 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, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, 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 producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.