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

On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded 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 declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished 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. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

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 never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.