The Spanish Misguided Perception of Franco's Dictatorship: Remembering the Atrocities
At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.
The Warning of Outward Mediocrity
To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.
His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.
"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed 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 see and feel themselves governed.
The Reality of Brutality and Suppression
Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.
He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.
A Deliberately Slow and Violent War
His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.
After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.
Famine and Pariah Status
However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. 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 misery.
Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation
His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.
As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.
State Terror and Historical Amnesia
Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – 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 disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.
He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.
Return to Violence and Medieval Execution
Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.
Anxiety and Democratic Change
Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning 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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "
The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.
Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage
Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.
And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.
The Peril of Unawareness
During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.
Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.
