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

At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," 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: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

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, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.