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

At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves 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 fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. 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 Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, 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 ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards 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 producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number 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 defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

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, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.