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

At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right 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 absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

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 flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, 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 European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure 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 culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.