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

Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm 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 Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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 avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, 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 afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible 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. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. 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 stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; 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 boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

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

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.