The Spanish Overly Positive Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Revisiting the Atrocities

At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

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. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage 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 rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

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 inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.