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

Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, 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 year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, 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 insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

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, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method 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 employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, 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 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people 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.