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

Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire 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 experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, 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.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a 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 dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.