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

On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war 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 "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade 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 afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, 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 establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described 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 avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.