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

On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts 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 – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France 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: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing 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 misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up 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. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well 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 realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.