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

At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, 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 compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking 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.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting 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.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change 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 account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.